Description
The Madrid and Barcelona data centre markets have grown rapidly on the back of strong demand, the former driven by the arrival of US cloud providers and the latter by new subsea cables and neocloud interest. But the booming demand spurred an unmanageable amount of power requests, both in number and scale, and across Spain as a whole but especially in Madrid. Data centres accounted for a substantial amount, along with renewable energy and other projects, and much of it was speculative. Data centres are also competing for power with residential requirements as the country grapples with an acute housing shortage.
The government’s inability to deal with the surge in power requests has brought development in Madrid to a near standstill. There is demand and investor appetite, but the power constraints, confusion about future availability and frustration at the lack of progress could be pushing investments and customers elsewhere. Its early potential to serve spillover demand from constrained FLAP markets has been eroded, and Madrid demand may actually be flowing to other markets, notably Milan.
There is hope on the horizon in the form of new legislation enacted in March 2026 and a 3.8GW allocation for data centres in the 2025–2030 Electricity Grid Development Plan. But there is also caution. A previous attempt to mandate financial guarantees to weed out speculative power requests had little effect. The new measures include regular payments to stay in the grid queue which should be more effective. But, despite aid from SpainDC, the government is still struggling to understand the industry and distinguish between credible operators and projects, and more speculative ones. As owner of grid operator REE, it is the government that has the final say on power requests and also approves REE’s investment programme. REE under-delivered on its 2020-2025 development plan and there are no guarantees that it can deliver the full 3.8GW allocated to data centres for 2025-2030 – or when.
Spain has everything on paper – land, low-cost low-carbon energy, great fibre connectivity and people – to become a leading data centre hub. If the power issues can be solved, Madrid has long-term potential as a major hyperscale market in Europe and Barcelona for enterprise, neocloud, public sector and AI inferencing deployments. We anticipate Madrid will exceed 1GW of built-out capacity in 2031, with growth weighted towards the back end of the five-year forecast period. Barcelona will grow more than threefold to over 270MW over the same period.
This report is an excellent resource for any service provider, investor, real estate developer or enterprise end user looking to understand and project the data centre markets in Madrid or Barcelona, or find a service provider. Structure Research now has DCAI reports for the European FLAP markets plus Milan and Madrid in southern Europe, as well as a DCI Market Spotlight report on Rome. The methodology applied continues to be the most robust in the industry. The supporting dataset is built from comprehensive asset-level tracking, capacity is measured purely on a power basis, and inventory is aggregated in tiers according to build status, absorption rates and maximum capacity levels.
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