Summary
- The Moncalieri proposal covers four data centre buildings on roughly 270,000 sq m at the former ILTE site.
- Planned electrical capacity is stated at 576MW, but no equivalent secured grid capacity has been disclosed.
- Piedmont is developing regional legislation to govern data centre development as larger projects enter planning.
A proposed 576MW data centre campus at the former ILTE industrial complex in Moncalieri is putting the scale of northern Italy’s emerging capacity pipeline directly into a regional debate over power, planning, and how large digital infrastructure projects should be regulated.
The scheme covers four data centre buildings across approximately 270,000 sq m of land on Via Fortunato Postiglione. Moncalieri’s public records show that an application for approval of an executive development plan for a large-scale data centre campus was lodged on 29 July 2026.
The project became public in September. Piedmont Regional Council subsequently cited a planned total electrical capacity of 576MW while answering questions over the region’s proposed data centre law.
Local reporting identifies real estate fund LCP as the promoter and says it acquired the former printing complex in 2022. Reports have put the prospective investment above €4.5 billion and associated employment at several hundred jobs, although those numbers remain project estimates rather than contracted expenditure or operating headcount.
576MW is a requirement, not yet a supply
The proposed electrical figure is the most important number in the project and the one requiring the greatest caution. A planned 576MW campus load does not demonstrate that 576MW of grid capacity has been secured, that substations have been contracted, or that each building will ultimately be delivered.
At that scale, power infrastructure would be central to the project programme. The campus would need major high-voltage connections, transformers, switchgear, backup systems, and a cooling architecture sized for the resulting IT load. The timetable for those systems can be longer than the shell construction of the data centre buildings themselves.
The scale also explains why the Moncalieri proposal has become part of Piedmont’s policy debate. Regional councillor Valentina Cera raised the project during a question-time session on 22 September, describing the succession of larger developments as a reason for a uniform regional framework.
The regional administration said it had launched a public consultation on data centre legislation and was reviewing submissions before moving the proposed law through the legislative process. The framework is expected to give municipalities clearer rules for assessing projects that can carry industrial-scale power, land, water, noise, and environmental implications.
Those questions are becoming harder for individual councils to handle through conventional commercial-property planning. A data centre campus can resemble a large industrial plant in its electrical demand while combining planning issues associated with warehousing, power generation, mechanical systems, and telecommunications.
The former ILTE site gives the Moncalieri project one characteristic policymakers increasingly favour: reuse of previously developed industrial land. Brownfield reuse can reduce pressure for greenfield development, but it does not resolve network capacity, heat rejection, backup-generation emissions, or the effect of a very large continuous electrical load.
The region therefore faces two connected questions. The first is whether individual sites are physically capable of receiving the power their promoters propose. The second is what standards should apply consistently across municipalities when projects reach several hundred megawatts.
The proposed law is still being developed, and the Moncalieri plan remains at an early planning stage. No tenant, detailed delivery schedule, or firm power arrangement has been publicly identified in the material reviewed for this draft.
That distinction is important in a European market full of headline capacity pipelines. Large electrical numbers can indicate developer ambition, but they only become operating capacity after land, planning, finance, equipment, grid access, and customers converge.
Moncalieri has now entered that process with an unusually large figure attached. Whether 576MW survives the full planning and infrastructure process will be a practical test both for the project and for the rules Piedmont is building around the next generation of data centre development.
