Aragon and its data centers hope to stay out of the Chinese AI explosion

The appearance of the DeepSeek platform, the Chinese ChatGpt, has caught Aragon in the middle of a decisive commitment to the artificial intelligence and data center sector, an industry that capitalized on the nearly 40 billion euros of investment that fell on the Community throughout 2024. With projects from up to four multinationals underway, the DGA spokesperson, Mar Vaquero, indicated this Tuesday that they hope to stay out of the effects of the particular crisis that companies such as Microsoft, which will soon be set up in Zaragoza, or Nvidia, the latter with million-dollar losses, are suffering on the stock market.

“These are stock market movements that respond to a specific moment and that we do not foresee, nor have we made any estimates, that they could have an impact on the technological investments that are already being taken into account and are being processed, such as Pigas, and that were announced (most of them) last year,” Vaquero said. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described DeepSeek as “ impressive ” during an interview with the American television channel CNBC, in relation to the construction of the platform itself and the way data is processed.

In addition to the aforementioned Microsoft, which has a Declaration of Autonomous Interest (DIA) but not yet the PIGA, the Regional Executive has granted the highest degree of administrative processing for the expansion of the Amazon Web Services data centers in Huesca, El Burgo de Ebro, Villanueva de Gállego and Zaragoza (La Cartuja Baja). Two weeks ago, Red Eléctrica confirmed the expansion of the El Burgo substation (SET), a move that seems key to supplying energy to the ‘data centers’.

In the same direction, the public company announced on Monday the start of construction of the Calatorao SET for the so-called ‘ Rhodes Project ‘ of Blackstone, through its subsidiary QTS, with an investment of 7.5 billion euros that could double, reaching 15,000. This is reflected in the DIA published in the Official Gazette of Aragon at the end of last October. The latest multinational to join the data center fever, although with a Spanish parent company in the Capital Energy group, is Box2Bit.

Building its data centre campus in the Entreviñas industrial estate in Cariñena will cost 3.4 billion euros, plus 500 million for maintenance when the complex becomes fully operational in 2032. Work will begin in the last quarter of 2025 and will continue until 2029. It will be necessary to deploy four high-voltage lines and two new substations.