July 2026, Lacchiarella: a farming municipality south of Milan. Between one and two hundred people take to the streets against a data center project.
August 4, 2026, Rome: the Council of Ministers declares to be of paramount national strategic interest a €5.3 billion, roughly 400 MW program in Zibido San Giacomo and Lacchiarella.
A few weeks separate the two scenes. In between there is no dialogue, and that is the real 2026 theme for anyone building digital infrastructure in Italy. The permitting framework has been effectively reformed: a ten-month single procedure, a commissioner lane above €1 billion, connection reform. None of those rules produces consent — and consent, unlike a permit, has no peremptory deadline by which it must arrive.
1. The map of the protest
The phenomenon is not an isolated Lombard case, but in Lombardy it has the highest density, for the simplest reason: that is where the projects are. Thirty-three facilities already active, ten under construction in the metropolitan area alone, and estimates of around €25 billion of investment between 2026 and 2028, nearly two thirds of it in the region.
Recent months have brought mobilizations in the Pavia area — where some twenty projects are counted — in Travagliato near Brescia, in the north-west Milan area the press has christened "Rho Valley", and south of Milan. This is not an uprising: these are local committees, municipal administrations and environmental associations asking for criteria. And that is a legitimate request.
2. The three objections, taken seriously
The worst way to answer these challenges is to treat them as a communications problem. They are a design problem. Worth listing them for what they are.
Land. Many projects land on farmland or open ground. In a country consuming soil at among Europe's highest rates, and in a region where peri-urban agriculture is already under pressure, the objection touches the scarcest and least regenerable resource in play. A 400 MW shed on cultivated fields is hard to defend when disused industrial areas exist a few dozen kilometres away.
Water. Evaporative cooling systems can require significant volumes, and they require them precisely in the summer months, when water crises are most frequent. In a warming Mediterranean climate, the question "how much water does it use" is not obstruction: it is planning.
Heat. The debate circulates an estimate of thermal increases of up to five degrees within a two-kilometre radius of large facilities, a heat island effect compounding agricultural land consumption. It is a figure raised by committees and picked up by the press, and it should be handled with care — it depends decisively on cooling technology, size and site morphology, and is not transferable from one project to another. But the fact that the numbers are contestable does not make the substance irrelevant: a facility dissipating hundreds of thermal megawatts changes the microclimate around it. The right question is not "is five degrees true?", it is "where does that heat end up?".
3. The institutional answer has already arrived
Between June and July 2026, in regional hearings, WWF Lombardia asked for stricter criteria on soil, water and biodiversity; Legambiente and CGIL called for amendments requiring reuse of disused industrial areas rather than consumption of new farmland.
The outcome is Italy's first regional law dedicated to data centers, passed by Lombardy: siting criteria, implementation requirements, and charges payable to host municipalities.
Anyone building in Italy should read that text as a preview, not a local case. When one region writes the criteria, the others copy them; and the Data Center Framework Act awaiting the Senate already contains zoning rules and incentives for disused industrial areas. The direction is set: brownfield will become the condition, not the bonus.
4. What actually works
There is no communications answer to these objections. There are four design choices, made when the site is chosen and not afterwards.
- Brownfield. Disused industrial areas, former power plants, former factories, former mining sites. It is not only about consent: such land is often already grid-connected, already serviced, already zoning-compatible. The two most interesting strategic projects of 2026 are both conversions — a thermal power plant in Trino and a coal mine in the Sulcis.
- Water out of the loop. Closed circuit, air-side free cooling, adsorption systems. It costs more in capex and sometimes in efficiency. That is the price of a social licence to operate in a Mediterranean climate, and it is a price better paid at design stage than at the service conference.
- Heat reuse. Waste heat is the only impact that can be turned into a measurable community benefit: district heating networks, greenhouses, industrial processes, agri-food drying. In an earlier article we described the scale this can reach in Europe. It is also the argument that changes the tone of a public meeting.
- Verifiable charges and jobs. Not "we will create jobs", but how many, of what kind, with which training pathway and in which year. Communities have learned to tell construction figures from operating figures, and they are right to: those are very different numbers.
5. Our position, and what we will not say
It would be easy, from here, to write that Southern Italy is the answer because it protests less. That would be false and wrong: false because there is no guarantee it is so, wrong because seeking out the territory with the least capacity to object is exactly how the South was treated through seventy years of top-down industrialization. That is not our model and will not become it.
The thesis is different: in Southern Italy there are sites where the same infrastructure produces different impacts. Disused industrial areas instead of cultivated fields. Renewable energy already produced locally and in some hours curtailed for lack of load, instead of energy imported over a saturated grid. Communities where qualified industrial settlement is a request rather than an imposition — provided it brings real work.
As a Benefit Corporation we accept being measured on three numbers, and we will publish them once the facility is operating: otherwise-curtailed energy actually absorbed, share of waste heat reused, and share of qualified jobs held by regional residents three years after start-up. They are verifiable, comparable, and the only ones that genuinely answer the three objections in this article.
2026 handed the sector a permitting toolkit that works. 2027 will ask it for something no law can supply: the reason a community should want that facility. Anyone without an answer to that question will have every permit and no construction site.
Note: data on mobilizations and hearings come from press sources. The thermal impact estimates cited are subject to debate and depend heavily on the technology and context of each individual facility.