Madrid's 56MW Data Center: UK Colocation Cost Guide 2026

What Global Switch actually announced

Global Switch confirmed this week that construction has started on Madrid 2, a 24,000 sqm (258,335 sq ft) colocation facility that will sit next to its existing Madrid 1 building on Calle Yécora. The new facility is rated at 56MW and is being built by Spain-based contractor EIGO Construcciones, with the site scheduled to come online in 2029 and reach full capacity by 2032.

Madrid 1, the original facility on the campus, was built in 2000, covers 12,000 sqm and carries 14MW of capacity, with upgrades planned through 2027. Once Madrid 2 is complete, the combined campus will offer 70MW across the two buildings. Global Switch, founded in 1998, is headquartered in London and majority-owned by China's Jiangsu Shagang Group, and now runs 16 data centers across Europe and Asia Pacific totalling roughly 428,000 sqm.

Why Madrid keeps attracting this kind of capital

The Global Switch campus sits in an area nicknamed 'Silicon Alley' for its density of technology and internet firms, and Data Center Map lists 81 data centers already operating in Madrid, more than any other Spanish city. That density is the point: Madrid has repeatedly been described as attractive to operators because it combines available power, low and stable utility rates, and expanding campus development alongside strong hyperscale and cloud demand.

Global Switch's project lands in a market that is already building at campus scale rather than single-building scale. Data4's Madrid campus is targeting 70MW across six buildings, CyrusOne has a two-storey, 18MW site, Equinix has added MD5 and MD6 capacity, Telefónica's Tier IV Alcalá facility runs to 100MW, and separate proposals have surfaced for a 360MW campus in the region. Nabiax has secured 10MW deals on its own Madrid campuses, and one JLL estimate cited by DCD pointed to roughly 49% growth in the city's data center market size in a single year.

• •Madrid 2: 56MW, 24,000 sqm, online 2029, full capacity 2032
• •Combined Global Switch Madrid campus: 70MW after completion
• •81 data centers already operating in Madrid, per Data Center Map

The OVH trigger: reading Madrid against UK cloud cost rises

The timing matters for anyone who has just absorbed the recent OVH Cloud price hike and is now shopping around for EU alternatives rather than accepting the next renewal quietly. Madrid's low and stable utility rates are a genuine structural advantage when set against rising UK power and cloud costs, but colocation is not a like-for-like swap for managed cloud, and buyers need to model the total cost properly rather than compare headline rates.

Before committing capital or contract terms to a Spanish site, it is worth running the numbers to calculate your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) across colocation, cloud and hybrid scenarios, and to compare on-premise, colocation, or cloud compute options against your actual workload profile rather than a single provider's price list.

Latency arbitrage and sovereignty: the trade-offs that don't show up in a rate card

Moving workloads to Madrid introduces cross-border network hops that domestic UK colocation avoids, so any cost saving needs to be weighed against latency-sensitive applications, data residency obligations, and the practicalities of managing infrastructure in another jurisdiction. For organisations with UK data sovereignty requirements or regulatory constraints, it is worth taking time to explore the UK's sovereign AI and cloud repatriation index before assuming an EU site solves the problem cheaply.

None of this rules Madrid out. It simply means the decision should be made against a proper checklist rather than a spreadsheet of power prices alone — the same discipline buyers should apply when they how to pick a UK colocation datacentre in the first place.

Why the 2029 timeline changes near-term planning

Madrid 2 will not take live tenants until 2029, and won't hit its full 56MW rating until 2032, so it is not a fix for capacity pressure this year or next. Buyers with immediate AI or high-performance computing density needs still need a domestic answer now, which makes it worth taking the time to plan your rack space and power density against current UK facilities, particularly if you're weighing up hosting high-density AI racks in colocation before any Spanish capacity becomes available.

In practice, Madrid 2 belongs in a medium-term sourcing strategy: a genuine option to model for 2029-2032 contracts, run alongside — not instead of — decisions you need to make about UK capacity this year.

The bottom line for UK infrastructure buyers

Global Switch's groundbreaking confirms Madrid's trajectory as one of Europe's deepest colocation markets, with campus-scale supply from Global Switch, Data4, Equinix, Telefónica, Nabiax and others all expanding in parallel. For UK buyers reacting to the OVH price hike, that depth is genuinely useful leverage in negotiations — but it should feed a longer-term diversification plan rather than a knee-jerk migration, given the 2029 delivery date and the latency and sovereignty questions that come with moving workloads abroad. If you're still working through understand what colocation is versus managed cloud before deciding where capacity should sit, that groundwork will make any Madrid conversation far more productive.