Andalusia greenlights €1.26bn campus at Málaga TechPark
Author: Joe Peck
The Andalusian regional government in southern Spain has formally declared a major new data centre development a “project of strategic interest”, clearing the path for a €1.257 billion (£1 billion) facility to be built within the expansion zone of Málaga TechPark.
The announcement was made on Tuesday, 12 May 2026, following a meeting of the Consejo de Gobierno, the regional cabinet of the Junta de Andalucía.
The project is being promoted by Saltburn Holding, a company linked to brothers Rafael and José Benjumea Benjumea – grandsons of the founder of the Abengoa industrial group – and headquartered in Madrid.
The Benjumea brothers have also been active in other digital infrastructure ventures, including Aquilon Project Iberia and CSM Holding, positioning them as increasingly significant players in Spain’s fast-growing data centre sector.
Facility specifications
The proposed campus will occupy a 71,415m² plot within the SUS CA-23 sector of Málaga TechPark’s expansion area, in the Campanillas district on the city’s western fringe.
The facility is designed to meet Tier III / Tier III+ reliability standards and will deliver an IT power capacity of 100 MW, with a total electrical draw of 150 MW, placing it firmly in the hyperscale-adjacent category.
Intended workloads span data storage and processing, artificial intelligence inference and training, cloud services, and digital connectivity infrastructure.
Construction is scheduled to commence in 2027, with the strategic interest declaration valid through to 31 December 2031, providing a regulatory framework to cover the full development and early operational phases.
The development is projected to create 710 direct jobs during the construction phase, with a further 254 permanent positions once the facility enters operation.
Given typical multiplier effects for large-scale infrastructure projects, the indirect employment and supply-chain impact on the wider Málaga economy is expected to be substantially higher.
The declaration of strategic interest falls under Decreto-ley 4/2019, Andalusia’s framework for administrative simplification and the promotion of strategic economic initiatives. It activates the regional government’s Unidad Aceleradora de Proyectos (UAP – Project Acceleration Unit), designed to streamline permitting and reduce the bureaucratic timeline for large-scale investments.
The project file has received favourable assessments from the departments responsible for industry, territorial planning, environmental sustainability, agriculture, culture, and public health, alongside a technical endorsement from the UAP itself.
Málaga as a digital hub in southern Europe
The Málaga TechPark – also known as the Parque Tecnológico de Andalucía (PTA) – has been the anchor of the city’s technology economy since opening in 1992.
Today, it hosts more than 650 companies across ICT, cybersecurity, fintech, and research and development, employing over 20,000 people and contributing around €4.8 billion (£4.1 billion) to Andalusia’s GDP.
International tenants include Google, Agilent Technologies, and TDK, among others.
The Saltburn Holding campus would be the second major data centre to be announced in Andalusia in quick succession. Construction is already under way on Sierra DC’s macrocentre in Escúzar, Granada – a project backed by Swedish capital with an investment approaching €1 billion (£865 million) – signalling that the region is beginning to attract the kind of hyperscale-scale commitments that have so far concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, and the Iberian Atlantic coast.
However, despite the scale of investor interest, electrical grid constraints remain a structural challenge for Andalusia’s data centre ambitions. Regional President Juanma Moreno has publicly acknowledged delays to at least one technology project in Málaga due to grid connection difficulties and insufficient power supply.
Industry analysts note that the region’s grid infrastructure has been deprioritised in negotiations between the Junta and the central government over Spain’s new energy planning framework, with data centres placed at the bottom of the list of infrastructure requests.
For the Saltburn Holding project, a planned electrical consumption of 150 MW makes grid access a critical dependency. How quickly those connections can be secured will likely determine whether the 2027 construction start holds.
