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DIGITAL REALTY ENTERS PORTUGAL, STRENGTHENING SOUTHERN EUROPE’ S DIGITAL BACKBONE
Digital Realty, one of the world’ s largest cloud- and carrierneutral data centre platforms, has announced its entry into Portugal through the acquisition of a data centre facility in Lisbon. This expansion enhances the company’ s global data centre footprint and reinforces its commitment to enabling seamless connectivity across key international markets.
The Lisbon facility is expected to support up to 2.4 MW of IT load and represents a critical addition to Digital Realty’ s Southern European footprint. Multiple strategic network service providers are already connected to the facility, underscoring its immediate interconnection value. Located on the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal is rapidly emerging as a key global digital and interconnection hub, supported by extensive industry investment in subsea cable infrastructure that connects Europe with North America, South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Lisbon serves as Europe’ s Atlantic gateway, offering low-latency connectivity to the Americas and reinforcing the continent’ s transcontinental data routes. Previously, subsea-related deployments were routed through Digital Realty’ s facilities in Madrid; however, by establishing a facility in Lisbon, Digital
Realty will reduce latency and bring its customers closer to the subsea cable landing infrastructure. The city is uniquely positioned as the only location in Europe with direct subsea connectivity to South America, while also acting as a gateway hub for West Africa and adding diversity to the Mediterranean subsea network. Today, 16 subsea cables land in Portugal, the majority near Lisbon.
“ Adding Portugal to our portfolio represents a key piece of our Iberian strategy,” said Paula Cogan, Managing Director EMEA, Digital Realty.“ With its unique subsea connectivity and position as Europe’ s Atlantic gateway, Lisbon adds meaningful diversity and resilience to regional data flows, while simultaneously complementing our existing presence in Madrid and Barcelona. This expansion strengthens interconnection across our platform and gives customers unparalleled choice and agility as they scale their businesses globally.”
Telefónica has selected Nokia to deploy AI-ready networking solutions across new Edge data centre sites throughout Spain – advancing the nation’ s next-generation digital infrastructure.
Under an exclusive multi-year agreement, Nokia will deliver connectivity for 17 distributed Edge nodes, 12 of which are already operational.
The deployment strengthens Telefónica’ s shift towards a distributed Edge architecture that brings compute and storage closer to end-users. Designed to support AI training and inferencing at the Edge, the new infrastructure will power digital services across healthcare, education, industry and government while reinforcing Spain’ s data sovereignty and technological leadership in Europe.
Nokia is providing high-speed, ultra-low latency and highly reliable connectivity within each Edge facility, linking compute and storage environments and connecting each site to external networks.
The rollout includes Telefónica’ s flagship Tecno-Alcalá data centre, one of the largest facilities globally.
NOKIA AND TELEFÓNICA EXPAND AI-READY EDGE DATA CENTRES ACROSS SPAIN
The agreement builds on a successful 2024 pilot involving three initial Edge data centres and establishes Nokia as Telefónica’ s sole networking technology partner for this nationwide expansion. The single-vendor model simplifies operations, unifies architecture and improves efficiency across the programme.
Connectivity inside the Edge data centres is powered by Nokia’ s 7220 Interconnect Router data centre switches and 7750 Service Router gateways, enabling deep automation, multi-cloud integration and agile scalability to meet evolving AI and cloud demands.
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