Irish data center firm Echelon is expanding into Italy with plans for a new campus outside Milan.

The company this week announced it has partnered with controlled affiliates of Starwood Capital Group to acquire a 37-acre site with grid power near the Lombardy city.

Echelon said development on the €3bn ($3.53bn) LIN10 campus will begin “immediately.”

The site reportedly has 250MW of gross power, with 100MW available immediately via the site’s existing substation.

Planning documents suggest the company is targeting a site in Treviglio near Bergamo, previously owned and operated by Elcograf as a printing plant. Echelon is initially looking to reuse the site’s existing building to offer 72MW of IT capacity before adding a second, 120MW, building. On-site solar panels are planned, and the generators are set to use HVO instead of diesel.

Niall Molloy, CEO of Echelon, said: “LIN10 has in place grid power, scale, and flexibility, which makes it one of the most attractive projects in Europe. It is ready to build and offers exceptional opportunities for hyperscale operators. We expect to start construction imminently and have the facility operational in 18 to 24 months. Everyone at Echelon is delighted to have secured our first development site in continental Europe.”

Founded in 2016, Echelon has more than 600MW of capacity either operational or in planning in Ireland and the UK, and recently announced an expansion into Spain.

Echelon’s major shareholder is Starwood Capital Group, a global private investment firm with approximately $115 billion in assets under management across North America, Europe, and Asia. Starwood is developing a number of data centers in the US and last year launched a dedicated data center unit, and significant portions of its newest fund will reportedly go to data centers.

The company said the acquisition of LIN10 is part of the company’s plans to develop a further 1.5GW of capacity across new locations over the next five years.

Maximilian Gentile, SVP at Starwood Capital, added: “We believe in the fundamental growth drivers of the Milan data center market. Demand for data center capacity continues to grow exponentially globally, and this investment demonstrates Echelon’s commitment to delivering power and scale to help customers meet the requirements of an increasingly AI-driven digital economy.”

Echelon’s sites in Ireland – DUB10 and DUB40 in Dublin’s Clondalkin and Grange Castle, as well as DUB20 and another County Wicklow site, DUB30 – that will have a combined capacity of around 400MW. In the UK, it is developing the LCY10 site in London’s Docklands. A second London campus (LCY10) is planned in Chesham, Buckinghamshire.

Over the summer, Echelon formed a joint venture with Spanish renewable energy company Iberdrola to develop a 160,000 sqm (1.72 million sq ft), 230MW campus, expected to be ready for service by 2030.

Echelon reportedly recently sued several companies in the US, accusing power provider MPD Electric Cooperative and commercial real-estate developer Marlboro Development Team of hijacking multi-billion-dollar plans to build data centers in South Carolina.

Italian printing firm Elcograf closed the Treviglio plant at the start of 2024.