Madrid's power queue is the asset Nabiax is buying for €800 million

Nabiax started work last week on Alcalá Data Center 3, the hall in Alcalá de Henares that completes its Alcalá campus, and put a price on it: nearly €800 million, or $918 million, for as much as 100MW of IT capacity phased in through 2029, which pushes the company's installed Spanish IT power to 135MW when added to the two halls already on site and its facilities in Catalonia. Asterion Industrial Partners created Nabiax in 2019, and word that a third Madrid building was coming surfaced last month.

Divided by announced IT load, the project prices at roughly $9.2 million per megawatt, and what that figure buys is a shell and a power connection rather than a tenant; the announcement names no customer and no lease, and the 100MW phases in through 2029 instead of arriving in a single commissioning.

The campus has been accumulating since 2013, when ADC1 opened with 4,800 square meters (51,666 square feet); ADC2 followed in 2022 with 6,000 square meters (64,583 square feet), and together the two halls deliver 22MW, a figure ADC3 will exceed more than four times over as it targets hyperscale customers, cloud services, and AI workloads behind a closed-loop cooling system.

Pablo Ruiz-Escribano used the ceremony to draw a line that matters more than the capacity count: Nabiax's chief executive argued for separating mature projects—those with approved financing, obtained licenses, or construction already underway—from new developments, and asked for a policy framework that pairs sustainability targets with safeguards for investment and legal certainty. The ask is a pricing argument, because a pipeline that grades financed, licensed, and permitted projects the same as speculative ones compresses a spread that ought to be wide, and Nabiax sits on the side of the line it wants drawn.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso supplied the crowding numbers at the same event, putting Madrid at 58 projects—41 operational, 15 under construction—with another 40 in a portfolio representing roughly €15 billion of investment. The president of the Community of Madrid then offered unqualified support: data centers, she said, "are not a problem, but rather part of the solution and an opportunity that we certainly intend to take advantage of," and she called for a stable regulatory framework.

Power is where a pipeline of that size meets its ceiling: on September 11 Spain tendered 937MW of grid capacity in a coal phase-out area with no price, no deadline and no revenue guarantee, a headline figure that stays a statement of intent until the tender document appears. Grid position has become the collateral in this asset class, and the trade worth underwriting is the queue rather than the tenant. Nabiax's €800 million is what it costs to hold a position in Madrid's queue while the terms are still being written.

In Spain's renewable announcements the blank column has been the price; at Alcalá the price is stated and the missing entry is demand, since ADC3's brief points at hyperscale, cloud and AI tenants and the announcement fills in no name, leaving the hall pre-sold on specification alone. The hierarchy in this market is unforgiving—hyperscaler-anchored assets earn infrastructure pricing while everything else fights for capital—and an unleased hall sits on the wrong side of that divide until a lease exists. Nabiax's wager, a defensible one, is that Madrid's power and connectivity make the specification sufficient by itself.

The phasing is the quiet part, because committing to 100MW through 2029 spreads the capital against demand the announcement does not name—the same way capacity has been added at Alcalá for a decade, 22MW across thirteen years and then a single hall more than four times that size. If hyperscale procurement keeps absorbing it, Nabiax looks early and cheap; if the next buying cycle pauses, the campus carries a connection sized for customers who have not signed.

The demand story the company is telling has widened past storage and compute: Ruiz-Escribano described data centers as critical infrastructure for the digital economy, said they are now "the home of artificial intelligence," cited uses running from medical research to public services, and placed ADC3 inside Spain's push to establish itself as a European digital hub on the strength of energy, connectivity, talent and geography. Of those four, energy and connectivity can be bought with a check; talent and geography have to be built, which is where the University of Alcalá partnership Nabiax announced comes in—scholarships, internships, and research aimed at steering locally trained people into the sector, alongside the regulatory certainty that both the chief executive and the region's president asked for.

Nabiax has until 2029 to show the entry price was right, and the first test is the first named tenant rather than the next tranche of IT load. For the rest of Madrid's €15 billion pipeline, the same test sits in the same place: a 937MW tender that arrived without a price has to come back with one.