Madrid: Solar energy developer Solaria Energia y Medioambiente SA has signed a memorandum of understanding with Japanese company Datasection Inc to build a data centre in Spain with a capacity of as much as 200 megawatts.
The agreement involves construction of the facility for artificial intelligence (AI) in an area as large as 100,000sq m in one of Solaria’s plants in Puertollano, the company said in a statement, confirming an earlier Bloomberg report.
The plant is equipped with clean rooms – highly insulated spaces used in the past to manufacture photovoltaic cells – that would be adapted to house the technological components of the data centre.
The large amounts of power needed by data centres to process AI information has drawn the attention of Solaria and other producers of renewable energy, as big technology companies including Microsoft Corp and Meta Platforms Inc have set themselves ambitious clean-energy goals.
Electricity use by data centres may surge as much as tenfold by 2030 and drive demand for solar energy paired with battery storage, although natural gas will also play a role “given the relatively short time frame to build such technologies”, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Rob Barnett and Patricio Alvarez.
Generative AI “spending also could boost renewable capacity growth and earnings,” the analysts said.
Datasection will focus on ensuring the supply of graphics processing units, or GPUs, and servers for the project, as well as on managing the data centre and the related cloud services, according to the statement.
Solaria announced earlier this year it got approval from Spain’s power grid operator to supply 155 megawatts for data centres, and is seeking to expand that capacity to one gigawatt. The company has also set up a unit dedicated to those facilities. — Bloomberg
