Kuok Group plans €5.3B data center investment in Italy as AI infrastructure race heats up

Singapore’s Kuok Group is putting €5.3 billion, roughly $6 billion, into building a hyperscale data center campus just south of Milan. The project, disclosed by Italian Industry Minister Adolfo Urso on June 26 after meeting with representatives from Kuok’s digital infrastructure arm K2 Strategic, would deliver approximately 300 MW of capacity.

Italy’s data center gold rush

Kuok Group isn’t arriving to an empty party. Italy has become one of Europe’s hottest destinations for data center capital, with more than €25 billion in planned projects across 83 sites through 2028.

Just a month before the Kuok announcement, EdgeConneX revealed its own €3 billion plan for three data center campuses in Lombardy, the same region where K2 Strategic intends to build.

Who is K2 Strategic

K2 Strategic is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kuok Group, the sprawling Singapore-based conglomerate with roots in commodities, real estate, and hospitality. The digital infrastructure unit is led by CEO Meng Wei Kuok, who has been steering the company’s expansion into the data center market with considerable ambition.

K2 has already committed over $1 billion to projects across Southeast Asia, with operations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Ireland. The company’s stated goal is to reach 1,200 MW of total capacity by 2030, which makes the Milan project a cornerstone of that roadmap rather than a speculative side bet.

Adding 300 MW through a single campus represents a quarter of that 2030 target.

The AI infrastructure thesis

Europe has been playing catch-up in this arena. The continent’s data center capacity has historically lagged behind the US and parts of Asia, creating what industry participants see as a supply gap ripe for investment. The wave of announcements hitting Italy, totaling that €25 billion-plus pipeline, reflects a continent-wide scramble to build the infrastructure that AI’s growth trajectory demands.

For K2 Strategic, the Milan campus represents a bet that European enterprises and cloud providers will need local data processing capacity rather than routing everything through existing hubs in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Dublin, the so-called FLAD markets that have traditionally dominated European data center activity.

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