Summary
- VGP has identified data centre opportunities at Rüsselsheim and Paderno Dugnano.
- Rüsselsheim has 65MVA grid capacity, while the Milan-area site has a secured 120MVA connection.
- Neither project represents committed construction capital, with several development gates still outstanding.
VGP has set out plans to make data centres a new infrastructure segment, identifying brownfield sites near Frankfurt and Milan as its first two concrete opportunities while stressing that neither has yet passed final investment approval.
The European logistics and industrial property developer used its 3 September Capital Markets Day to give investors more detail on the strategy. Rather than presenting speculative land alone, VGP highlighted sites where substantial electricity capacity is already available or secured — an increasingly valuable distinction in Europe’s constrained data centre markets.
At Rüsselsheim in the Frankfurt region, VGP says the site has a 65MVA grid connection, with 50MVA allocated to data centre use. Its presentation also identifies the potential for a further 140MVA from an on-site power plant and/or additional grid capacity, although that element remains subject to technical reliability and suitability work.
The second project, at Paderno Dugnano in the Milan region, has a secured 120MVA grid connection. Both sites are brownfield assets and sit within established hyperscaler cloud availability zones, giving VGP a combination of redevelopment land, power, and proximity to existing digital-infrastructure markets.
Those ingredients do not amount to shovel-ready data centres. VGP’s own material lists zoning and permitting, power, remediation, customer commitments, and final investment approval among the gates still to be cleared. The presentation is unusually explicit on that distinction: potential capacity is not the same thing as committed construction capital.
Across the opportunity set, VGP identifies about 225MW of potential customer IT power backed by more than 300MVA of grid capacity. It associates that platform with gross capital expenditure of roughly €2 billion to €2.5 billion, but says no capital has yet been committed to the programme.
The strategy places VGP in a part of the development chain where European data centre economics are increasingly being determined before a server hall is designed. Land that can support a large building has relatively little value to a hyperscale developer if the corresponding electrical connection will not be available for years. A brownfield site with usable megavolt-ampere capacity can therefore have a very different development profile from an otherwise comparable plot waiting in a connection queue.
Rüsselsheim also illustrates why the next wave of powered sites may blur conventional boundaries between property development and energy infrastructure. The possibility of additional on-site generation could increase the site’s available power envelope, but it creates its own engineering, fuel, emissions, planning, reliability, and operating questions. VGP has not presented that additional 140MVA as secured data centre capacity.
The company is also considering a partnership model rather than building the platform alone. Its Capital Markets Day presentation refers to a memorandum of understanding covering specialist design, operations, and fund capabilities, with a proposed 50:50 structure between VGP and a partner. The arrangement remains subject to final agreement.
That approach would allow VGP to contribute its established capabilities in land acquisition, permitting, development, and brownfield regeneration while bringing in data centre-specific expertise for a type of asset with considerably different commissioning and operating requirements from a logistics building.
The two named projects now have clearer electrical parameters than many early-stage European data centre proposals, but the next gates are the difficult ones: turning grid capacity into an approved design, securing anchor demand, completing remediation and planning work, and deciding whether the economics justify investment.
VGP’s entry therefore adds another large European property developer to the competition for powered land. The figures attached to Rüsselsheim and Paderno Dugnano are substantial, but the company’s own caveats keep the distinction clear — these are credible development opportunities, not yet committed data centre campuses.
