MADRID (Reuters) - Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, plans to invest 7.5 billion euros ($8.2 billion) to develop data centres in Spain's Aragon, boosting the region's growing status as a major cloud computing hub in Europe.
The U.S. private equity fund will follow tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon in choosing the regional capital Zaragoza in northeastern Spain, where so far 19 data centres projects have been submitted to local authorities for approval, a spokesperson for the Aragon's regional government said on Tuesday.
Blackstone will develop the buildings by installing cooling machines and cable connections with the aim of leasing them to companies who will install computer servers.
A spokesperson for Blackstone confirmed the planned investment.
The Aragon regional government said in June that tech giant Microsoft was planning a 6.69-billion-euro investment in data centres in the region and Amazon's cloud computing unit AWS said in May it would invest 15.7 billion euros to build its own data centres there.
Amazon said it would power its data centres with renewable energy. The Aragon region has a large wind power capacity.
($1 = 0.9170 euros)
(Reporting by Inti Landauro; editing by Charlie Devereux and Tomasz Janowski)
