Spanish renewable energy firm Solaria is building a 200MW data center.
At an event in Puertollano (Ciudad Real) this week the company officially announced an agreement with Japanese technology company Datasection to develop an artificial intelligence data center.
The agreement will see the supply of up to 200MW and the use of up to 100,000 sqm (one million sq ft) of space in Solaria’s own industrial facilities in Puertollano converted to data center use.
The site has clean rooms previously used for the manufacture of photovoltaic cells. In the coming months, these rooms will be used to house racks from Super Micro equipped with Nvidia GPUs.
The first phase will have 40MW of power and will occupy all of the existing clean rooms.
Darío López, CEO of Solaria, said: “This data center will bring progress and wealth through the creation of more than 100 jobs and the investment of almost €500 million ($555m) in this first phase. This agreement gives a great boost to our new data center division that we created last May and demonstrates the transformation and evolution of our business model in the 22 years of Solaria’s history."
Miguel Ángel Ruiz, Mayor of Puertollano said the news marks the "beginning of a stage of innovation and progress for Puertollano."
He said: "This milestone not only puts our city on the map of cutting-edge technological development, but also positions us as a benchmark in the field of digital transformation."
Norihito Isihara, CEO of Datasection, added: “This project, one of the largest artificial intelligence data centers, will have great potential in the future. Puertollano is a safe bet."
Puertollano is a municipality in the province of Ciudad Real, Castile-La Mancha.
In May, Spanish energy company Solaria announced the launch of a new data center subsidiary. The company said at the time it had 155MW of grid connections and was requesting another 860MW. The company didn’t provide any locations or specifications of planned data centers.
Details of the agreement with Datasection surfaced earlier this month.
Founded in 2002, Solaria operates dozens of solar farms around Spain, and also has sites in Portugal, Sardinia, and mainland Italy, as well as Greece and Uruguay. The company has around 1.7GW of capacity in operation, and is due to reach 4.3GW by 2026.
Founded in 2000, Japan’s Datasection provides data science services, including business intelligence tool construction and data analysis algorithm development. It owns a portfolio of data companies.
According to the company’s website, the Puertollano rooftop solar site launched in 2010 and totals 640kW.
