Italy's 95GW data center queue is a market for grid slots

Data center developers and their proxies have asked Terna, Italy's grid operator, for 95.38GW of connection capacity, up from 1GW in 2021 and 31.28GW in 2024, a queue first reported by Data Center Dynamics. It is best read as a market for grid slots, with the computer room downstream of the connection contract.

Il Sole 24 ORE's analysis of Terna's applications over the past five years shows the composition: only ten percent came from data center operators, sixty percent from property developers and logistics companies, and thirty percent from special-purpose vehicles and design firms. Fortune Italy reports that just 15 of the 531 connection requests Terna has received since 2021 are close to final approval. The gap between 95GW of requests and 15 that might get built is not a construction forecast; it is a measure of optionality.

Terna's process explains why the option has value: an applicant submits an estimated power usage and a location, and Terna replies with a connection solution and the fees it will charge when the connection contract is signed. Because the connection right is the gating item and the fees attach to it, the slot itself commands the premium. As this publication has argued, a grid slot is worth more than the hardware behind it; the Italian queue is that argument in its purest form.

Most of the applications over the past five years came from Italy's northern regions, with Lombardy alone accounting for 290 requests and 49GW of capacity, much of it around Milan. Terna is developing 27 electrical substations in Lombardy to meet that demand, five of which already have local authorization; Lazio, Piedmont, and Apulia account for most of the rest. The concentration around Milan, where land is expensive and power is scarce, means the queue is pricing location as much as electricity.

Against that backlog, Terna, which operates Italy's high and extra-high voltage grid, is spending: last year the operator unveiled a ten-year plan to invest €10 billion ($11.6bn) in the national network, including a €3.7 billion ($4.3bn) HVDC submarine cable to connect Campania with Sicily and Sardinia, a 40 percent boost to cross-border power transfer, and an increase in market-zone energy exchange capacity from 16GW to 39GW. Read against a queue that has tripled since 2024, the mix of 300 new requests in eight months and five authorized substations in Lombardy suggests the queue is growing faster than the permitting pipeline can absorb.

The pattern echoes the approval fight playing out project by project: last week, as PID reported, Tendercapital-backed Cobra Green won a municipal vote in Colleferro for a 150MW AI data center, a step toward a 2027 start. The Italian government has yet to sign off, and no tenant or compute capacity has been disclosed; Colleferro is the micro version of the queue, with a municipal vote serving as the gating event.

The real pipeline in Italy is the 15 requests close to final approval; the other 516 are the cost of holding a place in a queue that has become the asset itself. The winners will be the developers who can move a request from queue to contract to substation; everyone else is trading paper.