A new 120MW data center has been announced in Lombardy, northern Italy.

The facility will be designed by urban planning firm The Blossom Avenue Partners and built by property developers Edge Gate outside the town of Travagliato.

Though it has the potential to attract millions of euros in investment to the area, the municipality’s handling of the project’s planning application has been criticized by local politicians for its lack of transparency.

DCD has approached both firms for comment.

The facility will occupy a 1.4 million sq ft (130,000 sqm) site in an industrial area outside the town of Travagliato, according to reporting by Bresciaoggi.

The data center itself will sit inside a two-story warehouse, with a substation, fire station, and car park also planned. The developers have requested a grid connection, with an uninterruptible power supply to be provided by 60 emergency generators. A buffer zone will also be drawn around the site to mitigate noise and air pollution that might impact residents and wildlife living in nearby special conservation areas.

The data center will provide more than €11 million ($12.5m) to the local municipality, according to a report commissioned from Te.A. Consulting by The Blossom Avenue Partners. This includes €524,715 ($598,707) in compensation for building on agricultural land.

Despite this, the project attracted criticism from Alberto Trainini, a council member for Travagliato Bene Comune, who said that he only learned about it on July 2, which suggested that the municipality had known about the application for several months without telling the city council.

“The regret,” said Trainini, in comments reported by Giornale di Brescia, “is that we didn’t hear anything from the mayor sooner.”

The proposed data center has also triggered opposition from residents, one of whom has started an online petition urging the municipality to block the development.

Lombardy is proving an increasingly attractive data center market for operators in Italy, with 65 facilities listed in the region by DataCenters.com. It’s also proving an increasingly controversial one, with at least one new development in the town of Magenta attracting serious protests in June.

Partly in response to this opposition, Lombardy’s government recently passed Regional Law No.11/2026, Italy’s first regulatory framework for the approval of data centers. The law is intended to promote the sustainability of new developments and their construction on brownfield sites, among other measures.

Learn more about the data center market in Italy and Southern Europe, and meet with other executives and experts from the region at the DCN Milan event next year