Paul Berry-Selwood, chief commercial officer, HSCALE Credit: HSCALE HSCALE has signed a contract worth more than $1bn with an American cloud provider it will not name, for a Spanish data centre campus it will not locate. The company announced the deal this week. It describes the customer only as “a significant global cloud provider” and the site only as “a strategic metropolitan area within the Iberian Peninsula”. The release ends with one sentence on the subject: “The counterparty’s identity and detailed commercial terms remain confidential.” What the release says The contract is worth over $1bn.
The build carries roughly $1bn of capital investment. The first ready-for-service date is 2027. HSCALE says the campus is already well progressed and among the largest under construction in Spain. The agreement also sets up a framework for further work together across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
HSCALE is a joint venture between Bain Capital, which holds 80%, and Hamburg’s Aquila Group, which holds 20%. Paul Berry-Selwood, the company’s chief commercial officer, put it this way: “This deal is a powerful endorsement of HSCALE’s strategy and our ability to deliver complex, high-capacity infrastructure for the world’s most demanding cloud customers. Spain combines scale, connectivity and access to renewable energy, making it a natural location for the next generation of AI and cloud services. We are proud to be moving forward with a customer that shares our focus on operational excellence, speed and responsible long-term growth.” One detail does not line up HSCALE lists two Spanish sites on its own website.
BCN1 sits at Parc de l’Alba outside Barcelona. The plan there runs to 50MW of IT load. Its page gives a ready-for-service date in the fourth quarter of 2026. MAD1 is south west of Madrid, 180,000 square metres across four buildings, planned for 192MW, and dated to the third quarter of 2028.
Its power application is still underway. The announcement says first ready-for-service in 2027. Neither published date matches it. Either a page is out of date or the campus has been rephased around this contract.
HSCALE has not said which. Spain closes its data centre consultation tomorrow We covered the draft royal decree in August. It would require new sites to draw 80% of their electricity from renewables in every hour, hit a power usage effectiveness of 1.15 or better, and hold water usage effectiveness at 0.1. It also demands European establishment and European data residency.
The enforcement mechanism is the sharp part. Non-compliance costs a project its grid connection. The consultation closes on 10 September. HSCALE announced its contract the day before.
Why Spain Spanish wholesale power averaged around €44 per megawatt hour in the first four months of this year. Germany ran at roughly €96, Britain €103 and Italy €127. Renewables supplied more than half of Spain’s generation last year. Spain had 439MW of installed data centre capacity at the end of last year, up 24% in twelve months.
Madrid now ranks fifth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, ahead of Paris. The queue is longer than the need The environment ministry’s consultation documents acknowledge that roughly 12GW of grid access has already been granted to data centres. Its own assessment puts the country’s need at between 3.5 and 4GW by 2030. In Aragón the gap is starker.
The region runs about 108MW of data centre capacity today. Its grid access runs to around 3,600MW, more than double its entire peak electricity demand. Granted access and built capacity are different things. The decree is an attempt to make the first mean something.
We reported last month that 63% of Europe’s new capacity is now going somewhere other than Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, and that the reason is waiting time rather than price. Nobody has filled either blank DatacenterDynamics covered the announcement and confirmed HSCALE has not named the site. No named source anywhere identifies the customer. Searches in English, Spanish and Catalan turn up no reporting, no company statement, no planning document and no grid filing naming either.
The Spanish business press has not covered the deal at all.
