Alibaba Group provisional office at Xiong’an Credit: N509FZ Alibaba has held preliminary talks with Spanish solar producer Solaria about supplying power for a data centre at Puertollano, south of Madrid. Spain is drafting rules that would require data centre operators to be established in the EU and keep all data inside European borders. Alibaba has held talks with a Spanish solar producer that would supply power to a data centre in Spain. Spain is drafting rules that would require data centre operators to be established in the European Union.
Both things are happening at once. The conversations with Solaria are preliminary, according to people familiar with the matter, as Bloomberg reported. The plant under consideration is at Puertollano, about 240 km south of Madrid. Both companies declined to comment.
The plan would run on renewable power and sits earlier than the data centres Alibaba announced last week. The company has spoken to other suppliers too. Spain’s draft decree has two halves. One is about electricity.
The other is about who owns the building. Sites above 1MW would need 80% renewables every hour or lose their grid connection, with new demand matched to newly built clean capacity. The second half is harder. Operators would have to be established in the EU, with all data and metadata kept inside European borders.
The EU’s own sovereignty tiers cover sensitive public sector work, so Spain would be going further than Brussels. Solaria answers the first half well. It raised EUR 300M in April and holds a 3.4GW portfolio of secured data centre capacity across five countries. Its Puertollano project is 200MW on 100,000 square metres, built into clean rooms that once made photovoltaic cells.
Alibaba is not new here. It has run data centres in Germany since 2016, opened in Paris in June, and said last week it would add first cloud regions in Finland, the Netherlands and Turkey within twelve months. Whether an EU subsidiary of a Chinese parent counts as established in the EU is the question the decree has not answered. Nobody has said Alibaba would be excluded.
Spain is where this gets settled, because Spain is where the capacity is going. Its data centre capacity reached 439 megawatts at the end of 2025 and is forecast near 2,537 by 2030. Pedro Sanchez signed agreements in Beijing this year to attract Chinese investment. He is among the few EU leaders arguing for closer ties rather than tighter ones.
His government wants the rules published by the end of the year. One half of them invites this deal. The other may not. Also tagged with
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