The construction of AQ Compute's future Data Center Campus in Cerdanyola is already underway. The data center manager, a subsidiary of the German group Aquila Capital, has laid the first stone of the center, which will be built with an investment that will double the initially planned one: from the 300 million announced in 2022, the project scales up to 600 million, which will be allocated to the construction and equipment of the data center.
The complex, which will become operational in 2025, will occupy an area of 7,000 square meters, and is expected to generate 300 direct jobs and 1,500 indirect jobs. The data center, moreover, will not be built in isolation, but around it a training and innovation center for future data center engineers, and a research laboratory for energy efficiency and new IT technologies will be created, in an initiative in which CBRE acts as project manager.
AQ Compute's first data center at the state level, which will be powered by 100% renewable energy, has been designed with Artificial Intelligence especially in mind. AI will also revolutionize this sector, as it will exponentially multiply the generation of data that is stored, and that "will end up turning AI into a new economy with an impact on health, services, education and finance," according to AQ Compute CEO, Henry Daunert. "The data that will be stored in this cloud will be equivalent to that stored over the last 10,000 years," he highlighted.
The first stone was laid in an event attended by the mayor of Cerdanyola, Carlos Cordón, and the Secretary of Digital Policies of the Generalitat, David Ferrer, who highlighted the Parc de l'Alba as a space of opportunities for companies and citizens. Generated around the Alba Synchrotron, the business park aspires to position itself as an international benchmark in the field of data centers, in a context in which the impact of investment in data centers in Barcelona and its surroundings will exceed 7,000 million in 2025.