Aruba S.p.A receives €500 million in funding; builds two new data centres on Ponte San Pietro campus

Aruba S.p.A has announced a major expansion of its Global Cloud Data Center (GCDC) campus following a €500 million investment. The IT3 technology campus in Ponte San Pietro – already Italy’s largest data centre campus spanning 200,000m² - is now also home to two further ‘future-proof’ data centres and a large ultra-technological event space, the Aruba Auditorium.

The first of the new data centres has an area of more than 17,000 m² and 9 MW of power, spread over three large data rooms, with independent infrastructure dedicated to each room. The second is a multi-storey data centre with 8 data rooms placed on two levels, a full-scale power of 8 MW and a total area of almost 14,000m². The Aruba Auditorium, a large and ultra-modern gathering space for holding events that provides a total area of 1,500 m² and a seating capacity of about 400, will be capable of hosting multiple, multi-sensory events simultaneously.

The new latest generation data centres are the result of Aruba's long experience in the development, design, construction and management of high-tech infrastructures, and have become a reference point for the digitisation in Italy in terms of IT infrastructures, and cement GCDC’s position as an asset in the broader path of national transformation and innovation. The proprietary data centres store the data of millions of Italian and international citizens and companies and will create important skilled jobs in the area. The company has already started to select and train part of its future resources through the Aruba Academy, the Aruba Group's school established with the aim of recruiting new talent and training them in STEM and IT fields as well as partnerships with the University of Bergamo and the Polytechnic of Turin. This upskilling will also prepare Aruba to further scale the site, with future plans to add two more data centres already underway.

"We are proud to be able to officially present two new state-of-the-art Data Centers that will contribute to the digital transformation of the country,” said Stefano Cecconi, CEO of Aruba. “We design our technological campuses not only with the aim of future-proofing them, but also to be as eco-sustainable as possible, so as to minimise environmental impact, make consumption more efficient - in full compliance with reliability and safety standards - and achieve the highest levels of certification. We are particularly happy to inaugurate the new Aruba Auditorium, a place of aggregation and interaction that will allow us, other companies or local realities to organize events in a highly technological and innovative context."

Aruba scales its data centre infrastructure with sustainability top of mind, with GCDC is consistently green-by-design. The whole campus – a redeveloped industrial site where a historic textile company, Legler, once stood – is completely powered by renewable sources with Guarantee of Origin (GO) certification, while the campus infrastructure includes photovoltaic systems, geothermal systems, and a hydroelectric plant on the nearby Brembo River. The entire GCDC hub has also been designed and built with the aim of exceeding market standards in terms of reliability and performance: it is certified to meet and exceed the highest levels of resilience provided by ANSI/TIA 942 Rating level 4 and holds ISO 22237 (TBD) certification. Aruba is the first in Italy to be certified with this international standard for the entire lifecycle of the data centre, from strategic conception to construction, through to commissioning.

A European network – Aruba's European data centre network continues to expand: three modules now make up the Global Cloud Data Center, joined by two additional proprietary data centres in Arezzo and the Rome campus. Completing the network are an additional proprietary facility in Ktiš (Czech Republic), mainly dedicated to Central and Eastern European countries, and partner data centres that deliver services Europe-wide from Prague, Frankfurt, Paris, Warsaw and London.