Unnamed developer submits data center plan in Piedmont as region prepares law

An unnamed company has submitted plans for a four-building data center at the former ILTE industrial complex in Moncalieri, in Piedmont, on a site of approximately 2.9 million square feet (270,000 sqm) with a total planned electrical capacity of 576MW. Data Center Dynamics, citing the local outlet Torino Sud, reported the plan was made public on 17 September, and that the company submitted it with its scope and characteristics. The report does not identify that company, and names no tenant, financier or construction schedule. The one scale claim attached to the project comes from Councillor Valentina Cera, who said it "would likely become the largest facility in Italy."

What the file does contain is a site with a documented recent asking price. ILTE, a printing and publishing company founded in Turin in 1947, closed in 2016, and the building was listed for sale at €4 million ($4.5m) in 2023, according to the property portal Idealista. Whether the developer bought the complex, and at what figure, the reporting does not say. A listing price from 2023 and a megawatt count are not a budget: the same reporting supplies no construction cost, no power supply route and no customer, and at this size those gaps carry more weight than the square footage does.

Cera has used the submission to argue for regional rules. A succession of new, ever-larger projects, she said, makes the adoption of a clear, uniform and preventive regional regulatory framework "urgent and unavoidable," and the absence of such rules "creates difficulties for individual municipalities and local communities." The Regional Council of Piedmont had already identified data center legislation among its regulatory objectives for 2026, she said, and she asked where the approval process for the regional bill now stands.

Enrico Bussalino, regional councillor and assessor for the Piedmont Region, described the project as being at the consultation stage. A public consultation has been launched to gather comments, contributions and proposals, with the stated aim of "a participatory process based on transparency and dialog with the local community." Contributions already received are with the technical departments for the necessary assessments, Bussalino said, and once that preliminary review is complete the department will initiate the procedure to draft a new law. Piedmont is preparing a data center law; that drafting procedure has not begun.

Lombardy moved earlier. The neighboring region, which the same reporting describes as a target for data center development in Italy, recently passed Regional Law No. 11/2026, called in that coverage the country's first regulatory framework for the approval of data centers. Among its measures is an intent to steer construction onto brownfield sites, which is what Moncalieri is: a printing works that shut in 2016, sitting inside a municipality with no regional standard yet written to apply to it.

Cera's objection runs to process, and the sequence she describes is the one the region confirms. A municipality has been handed a proposal sized like national infrastructure while the region's technical departments work through public comments on it, and the law that would govern the review is still ahead of them. Moncalieri is, on the record so far, the file sitting in front of that process.

The reporting does not say where the electricity would come from, whether a grid connection has been requested, or who would take the capacity. Read as a development file, what exists is a site and a load: four buildings' worth of planned capacity with neither a supply route nor a customer attached. A power source and an anchor tenant are the two items that would turn a submitted plan into a project, and nothing in the coverage indicates either has been secured.

The next markers are narrow and checkable. Watch whether Piedmont's bill reaches the council carrying a brownfield preference the way Lombardy's does, and whether the developer is named before the consultation closes. The contributions are with the technical departments and the drafting procedure has not started, which leaves the region writing the standard against which a 576MW campus in Moncalieri will eventually be measured.