Google has suspended its plans to invest in Spain to build a large data center campus and its corresponding multi-billion euro investment due to the current regulatory climate.
The US tech company has been in talks with Spanish authorities for some time to launch this project, however, the reception at the highest levels has been cold amid the conflict of the Pedro Sánchez Government with big tech companies, which have become a target of his economic discourse, as confirmed by several sources to EL MUNDO.
Google Cloud, the subsidiary in charge of launching these projects, has declined to comment on the matter. The US company opened its cloud region in Madrid in 2021, the first data center deployment the company made in Spain, albeit with partners, meaning in third-party facilities that Google filled with its servers.
At that time, a five-year investment plan of 650 million in Spain was revealed, which included the cloud region itself and also the laying of the Grace Hopper submarine cable, anchored in Sopela, a town in Vizcaya.
Since then, the company has deployed its investment plan and has included new milestones such as a new submarine cable called Sol that will connect Santanderwith Palm Coast (Florida), with intermediate stops in Bermuda and the Azores. To serve this cable, it acquired a 5,907 square meter plot in the Scientific and Technological Park of Cantabria to build its transmission station.
"When operational, it will strengthen the capacity and resilience of Google Cloud's global network, which currently has 43 regions worldwide and continues to expand. Its deployment will meet the growing demand for cloud services and artificial intelligence in Europe, the United States, and other regions," as conveyed in the announcement of the land purchase by Sodercan (Regional Development Society of Cantabria).
This growing demand has led Google to simply not have enough infrastructure to meet all the demand generated by its customers, as acknowledged by its CEO, Sundar Pichai, in the last earnings conference in July, justifying the high investment projected by the company: 205 billion dollars (182.617 billion euros at the exchange rate).
A figure that, however, would be lower than that of 2027 if Pichai's guidance to the market in the coming months is maintained amid the market's growing fear of excessive spending on AI.
As part of this investment effort, Google has already announced numerous projects to build its own data centers with its infrastructure and TPUs, the processor with which it competes with Nvidia, across much of Europe.
The Scandinavian countries have concentrated a large part of these investments with Norway, Denmark, and especially Finland, where the company announced this September a 13 billion euro injection over two years to build AI infrastructure in its largest investment in Europe's history.
Prior to this, it had committed 5.5 billion by 2029 in Germany, 5 billion in Belgium, almost 4 billion for projects in the Netherlands, and its first data center in the Alps with the construction of a facility in Kronstorf (Austria).
If one stands in front of the map of Europe, the trail of announcements and data centers under construction can be followed from North to South and ends precisely on the Mediterranean coast. There, a void of its own infrastructure that will soon be filled and Spain has not yet lost the game. In its favor are also the investments made and the fact that a potential rival like Portugal is approaching the technology sector from Madrid.
Google is also an associate of the Spanish data center association Spain DC, which has been very critical of the decree and has even stated that it could mean the end of the entire sector. In fact, Google's Global Affairs President, Kent Walker, was in Madrid a few days ago with this issue on the table, as reported by El Confidencial.
Thus, if the decree makes the numbers unsustainable, everything is on the table, and the first stop will be the text that comes out of the Council of Ministers before the elections. Google, and its checkbook, are waiting expectantly.