MALAGA has been ranked the best place in Spain to build a data centre.
It beat out all cities nation, including Madrid and internationally was even more favourable than Zurich and New York in a new global industry study.
The ranking comes from Savills, the international property consultancy, in a study published this week that benchmarks 54 cities worldwide on how easy it actually is to build and power a data centre.
Malaga came in 11th out of the 54 markets — Oslo topped the table, with Dallas and Stockholm close behind — but still ahead of Madrid, making it the highest-ranked Spanish city in the study.
Savills said Malaga stood out as one of the emerging markets best placed to attract new investment in digital infrastructure.
The study pointed to competitive energy costs, favourable regulatory frameworks and less pressure on resources and infrastructure than in some of Europe’s more established data centre hubs.
Spain’s appeal rests partly on its electricity market – the country is a net exporter of power, draws heavily on renewables and offers some of the cheapest electricity in western Europe, while construction costs also run lower than in most comparable markets.
Both Malaga and Madrid benefit from unrestricted access to the electricity grid and planning rules that make it easier to get a data centre approved, but Malaga edged ahead on two narrower points: slightly cooler summer temperatures, and less local competition for electricity because its market is smaller than the capital’s.
The same study flagged water availability and high summer temperatures as challenges for Malaga, since both affect the cooling systems that keep dense data centres from overheating.
Spanish daily El Español reported that Malaga is not flush with water and that doubts persist locally over whether its electricity network has enough spare capacity to support large new projects.
The ranking comes as Malaga’s biggest data centre project yet moves through the approval process.
The Junta declared a data centre planned by Saltburn Holding a project of strategic interest in May, fast-tracking it under a 2019 decree designed to speed up major economic developments.
The project carries a price tag of €1.257 billion and will be built on a 71,415 square metre plot on the edge of Malaga TechPark, the technology park in Campanillas on the city’s northwestern outskirts.
It will be built to Tier III/Tier III+ standard, an industry classification meaning the centre can keep running through routine maintenance or a single equipment failure without interruption, and will handle data storage, artificial intelligence and cloud computing work.
Once built, it is expected to draw 100 megawatts of computing power and consume 150 megawatts of electricity, and to create 710 jobs during construction and a further 254 once it is operational.
The strategic-interest declaration remains valid until December 31, 2031.
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The Saltburn project is not the only one under way in the province.
Templus is expanding its existing data centre in the Guadalhorce industrial park, on the western edge of the city near the airport, aiming to triple its client base by 2027, while Unicaja is developing a new data processing centre of its own at Malaga TechPark.
The Power and Place study is certain that Malaga has the energy and planning advantages to compete with the world’s most established data centre markets.
But whether the city’s fragile water supply and electricity grid can keep pace with the investment now arriving is a question the ranking itself does not answer.
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