AQ Compute has broken ground on its 60MW data center campus in Barcelona, Spain.

On June 27, the company shared that construction works had begun on the company's second data center.

Located in the Parc de l’Alba (Cerdanyola del Vallès) in Barcelona, the campus will eventually have an IT capacity of 60MW. The first phase will see the construction of a 15MW data center, which is expected to be completed in 2025.

The design is modular and the buildings will be precast concrete on a larger than conventional scale. Each independent building
will have two floors with capacity for 400 racks and 15MW.

The data center, dubbed AQ-BCN1, will have cooling capabilities for high-density workloads including AI, and be designed to Tier III standards.

When the campus is fully built out, it will total 43,000 sqm (462,850 sq ft), and feature a direct fiber link to the Barcelona submarine cable landing station.

Plans for the Barcelona campus were first shared in September 2022, and the initial investment in the project has since doubled to €600m ($641.75m), as has the planned capacity.

Henry Daunert, CEO of AQ Compute, said: “With the start of construction of our data center in Barcelona, we are continuing our company’s growth strategy. We see an increasing demand for power-intensive IT applications and corresponding server capacities, which highly require energy and cost-efficient solutions, while simultaneously focusing on sustainability. This is exactly where our data centers come into play.”

CBRE is acting as project manager for the facility, and the design partner is PQI, a 70/30 joint venture between PGI Data Centers and PQC.

According to CEO Daunert, the company has plans for other data centers in the Iberian Peninsula, with the second planned for Llescas, in Castilla-La Mancha, 45 kilometers from Madrid.

AQ Compute was founded in 2020 when Hamburg-based investment company Aquila Capital decided to spin out a data center arm.

Earlier this month, AQ Compute announced plans to expand its AQ-OSL1 campus in Hønefoss, near Oslo, Norway, adding two new data center buildings.

A version of this story was published on our Spanish edition