Loading...ZARAGOZA, Spain — Aragon's rugged plains stretch out under a clear blue sky, the buildings visible as "a few tiny cubes sprawled like a throw of dice" across the terrain — as George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia, of his time here during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
Today, excavators eat the earth, carving huge chunks of the landscape in the race to build the behemoths of the AI boom.This drought-stricken region of northeast Spain has become the focus of American companies searching for locations to place their energy- and water-intensive data centers.In Aragon, Amazon Web Services promises to spend almost $40 billion to build multiple vast complexes — one alone as large as 600 American football fields.
Microsoft and the asset management firm Blackstone are among those following suit, signing agreements to build data centers that will transform this region and the livelihoods of its inhabitants.Heavy equipment excavates an area adjacent to an Amazon data center currently under construction in Cuarte, Spain, on Sept.
29.Local authorities have approved dozens of data center projects for U.S.
Big Tech and other companies that will transform the character of this region.Michael Robinson Chávez/for NPR hide caption Even as other countries enact regulations to curb the expansion of data centers (and Spain's national government weighs new restrictions), Aragon's regional government is welcoming the companies with open arms.
Touting themselves as the "Virginia of southern Europe" after the U.S.state with the largest concentration of data centers, they are taking the bet that hosting data centers will bring jobs and prepare the region for the economic shifts they believe AI will bring."This is a new economy that is evolving, and it's very difficult to foresee how many activities are going to be coming a...