On 14 October, a number bigger than Italy
On 14 October, at RCS Academy's Green & Net Zero Talk, Terna's CEO Pasqualino Monti gave a figure that went straight into every business paper: "We have now reached more than 100 GW of connection requests, for almost 600 initiatives".1 These are the applications filed with Italy's transmission grid operator by companies that want to build a data centre and connect it at high voltage.
On 15 July, during the heatwave, the whole of Italy drew 58.1 GW from the grid, the peak of the year. The all-time record is still July 2015, at 60.5 GW.2 Data-centre requests alone are worth almost twice the whole country at its moment of highest demand, homes, factories, hospitals, trains and air conditioners included.
Monti himself added a caveat. The requests, he said, "far exceed the real capacity to deliver the projects", as had already happened with renewables, and Terna will build infrastructure "according to how the initiatives actually mature".1 A large share of those 100 GW will never become a building. The problem is knowing which share, because every request takes a place in the queue, and the queue weighs on grid planning and in the end on electricity bills.
I have already written about AI's energy use in The invisible weight of artificial intelligence, and the data-centre counter shows how much energy they use worldwide. Here I look at something else: the gap, in Italy, between applications and building sites.
What 100 GW means
Why requests pile up
Terna is required to connect anyone who asks, and it handles high and extra-high voltage connections for facilities of 10 MW and above.3 It cannot turn an application down because it looks unserious. The applicant receives a technical solution with a quote, called the STMG. Accepting it moves the request to the next stage, and only after obtaining permits does it reach the detailed solution, the STMD, which comes before construction.
The weak point is the entrance. According to Luca Beltramino, president of the Italian Datacenter Association (IDA), a connection request currently costs 2,500 euros, whether it is for 100 or 200 megawatts.4 At that price it pays to file several applications for the same project at different points of the grid, or to reserve capacity on a plot of land and then sell the whole package to whoever will actually build. The University of Padua report produced with support from WWF puts it plainly: the quote is issued "without any preliminary assessment of technical, environmental or financial feasibility", and the queue cannot tell valuable projects from "decoy" ones, filed only to be there.5
The progress of the applications shows the imbalance. At the end of March 2026 there were 480 requests for 82.6 GW: 181 were still waiting for the applicant to accept the quote, 285 had accepted it and only 12, for 1.33 GW, had reached the detailed solution.5 By August the requests at the most advanced stage were 15, for 1.88 GW, under 2% of the capacity requested. Eight data centres were connected to the transmission grid as users in their own right, the first of them in 2017.6
Requests cluster where data centres already are. On 31 July Lombardy had 289 of the 529 applications, for 44.96 GW, about 47% of the national total. For the first time it had fallen below half, because Piedmont, Lazio and Puglia are growing.7
Data-centre connection requests by region, in GW
How many data centres we will see
To estimate how much power will be needed, Terna and Snam do not start from the applications. In the 2026 Scenario Description Document, the basis for the development plans of the electricity and gas networks, they assume an average data-centre load of about 1.7 GW in 2030, 3.1 GW in 2035 and 4.4 GW in 2040, looking at the projects furthest along in permitting.8 In 2030 that is about 15 TWh a year, 4.4% of the 338 TWh of electricity demand they expect.9
The industry, when it counts projects one by one, reaches the same order of magnitude. The IDA research presented in Rome on 8 October expects commercial capacity, the data centres that rent space and power to other companies, to grow from 460 MW in 2025 to about 2 GW in 2031. Including facilities that companies run for themselves, installed capacity was about 760 MW at the end of 2025. Qualified projects add up to 1,839 MW: 230 under construction, 673 in development and 936 still at a preliminary stage.10 The potential 36.9 billion euros of investment between 2026 and 2036 assumes that every qualified project gets built.
Milan is still the centre of it all. According to the Politecnico di Milano's mapping, the metropolitan area has 33 of the 49 data centres operating in Lombardy, with about 414 MW, 68% of national capacity, and the projects under assessment average 80 MW, against under 10 MW for those already running.11
Who pays for the grid
When a consumer connects at high voltage, it currently pays 50% of the transmission works needed to link it up.5 The rest, together with the reinforcements needed to carry power to where it is used, goes into the network charges that everyone pays on their bill. This is where paper requests stop being a statistical problem.
The grid operator has two options and neither is free. If it designs lines and substations for projects that later vanish, it spends money that ends up in tariffs. If it waits, those with real projects stay in the queue for years behind people who have only a plot of land and a 2,500-euro application. Monti has chosen the second option, building as projects mature. For bills it is the prudent choice, but it slows down serious operators, which is why they are the ones asking for tougher rules.
IDA has taken an unusual proposal for a business association to ARERA, the Italian energy regulator, asking to pay more. It asks for 500 euros per megawatt requested, a bank guarantee of at least half the cost of the connection bay, about 450,000 euros, and staged payments that are forfeited if commitments are missed. Beltramino estimates that only 1-2% of requests will turn into investment.4 On 8 October ARERA commissioner De Santoli announced a consultation paper on data-centre connections, proposing to drop first-come, first-served and to accept applications only from those who already hold permits.12
For renewables, with more than 300 GW in the queue, a similar rule has just arrived. The environment ministry decree signed on 8 September asks Terna to divide the grid into micro-zones, publish the capacity available in each and allocate it in periodic windows. Capacity is reserved for good only once the plant obtains its permit.13 For data centres, so far, Terna has opened a consultation until 13 November on a new annex to the Grid Code setting the technical requirements for connecting them at high voltage, which does not touch the queue rules.14
The South makes sense, but not because of today's price
You often read that energy is cheaper in the South. On the wholesale market, today, it is not. In 2025 the average price in the North was 115.9 euros per megawatt-hour and the gap with the South was 0.8 euros, while in 2024 it was the South that cost 1.7 euros more.15 In September 2026, with gas prices rising sharply, all mainland zones were between 201 and 207 euros and Sicily was at 238.16 What weighs more on investors is the gap with other countries, since in 2025 northern Italy paid on average 26.5 euros per megawatt-hour more than Germany.15
The reasons to look south are the grid and renewables. More than half of the roughly 23 GW of solar and wind already awarded but not yet running is in the South and Sicily zones. Terna and Snam expect the flow between the South and Centre-South zones to reverse by 2030, with 21.2 TWh moving north, and about 6 TWh of renewable output to go unused, mostly around midday in spring.9 A data centre close to those plants can use energy that would otherwise be curtailed, without new lines to carry it all the way to Milan. There are drawbacks too, such as a hotter climate and a thinner fibre network, but Bari, Palermo and Genoa are already landing points for intercontinental submarine cables.4
Other countries had to choose after a freeze. In Ireland data centres used 23% of metered electricity in 2025, against 5% in 2015.17 From 2021 a regulatory direction had in effect halted new connections; the rules published in December 2025 require new sites above 10 MVA to bring their own generation or storage, and to cover 80% of their consumption within six years with new renewables generated in Ireland.18 In February 2022 the Netherlands suspended new data centres above 70 MW and 10 hectares for nine months across the whole country except two northern municipalities, Hollands Kroon and Het Hogeland, chosen because they are close to the coast and to renewable energy.19
What I think
The interest is real. Italy accounts for about 12% of European GDP and hosts 4% of data-centre capacity, while in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin power has become the limit.4 But the 100 GW mostly measure how cheap it is to join the queue. I would not use that figure either to announce a boom or to frighten local councils, and I find it a good sign that the industry association itself is asking to pay for the reservation.
I agree with the two proposals on the table, a financial guarantee proportional to the megawatts and priority for those who hold permits. A reservation on the grid has a cost for everyone, and the person who makes it should pay for it. I would add a third thing that is missing today: a reason to build where the energy is. With zonal prices almost identical, the market alone will send nobody south, so the rules have to, with public maps of available capacity and faster connections at the nodes where the grid has headroom, as Terna will do for renewables. Lombardy's regional law 11 of 2026 goes in the right direction on land, because anyone who builds on farmland outside the priority areas pays double or triple the building levy.20 On the geography of energy, though, one region is not enough: the choice lies with ARERA and the ministry.
How to recognise a real project
- GridWhere the request standsAn accepted STMG is only the start. The detailed solution or a connection contract shows that the project has cleared its permits: by August under 2% of the requested capacity had got there.
- Land and permitsThe site and the authorisationSince 2026 there has been a single procedure for data centres that must close within ten months. A serious project has the land and a permitting process under way.
- Money and customersWho pays and who uses itAn operator with signed customers and accounts to show is different from a company set up just to file the application.
- Power in phasesMegawatts over timeAccording to IDA a 100 MW data centre is built over five years, in phases. Anyone asking for all the power at once is making a reservation.
The single procedure was introduced by Article 8 of Decree-Law 21 of 2026, which also halved the time allowed for environmental assessments.5 Anyone following the story over the coming months would do well to watch two numbers instead of the 100 GW: the requests that have reached the detailed solution, 15 in August for 1.88 GW, and the megawatts under construction counted by IDA, 230 in its October research.