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More than 1,000 people gathered in Piazza della Scala in Milan on Oct. 10 to oppose new data center construction in Lombardy, Il Giorno reported. The rally was the first national demonstration called by the National Network of Stop Data Center Committees. Organizers want the national government to suspend new authorizations until it sets a national plan.
In-article: A newly constructed data center campus in the Milan metropolitan area illustrating the scale of facility growth.
Representatives of 40 civic committees attended, Il Giorno reported. They came from towns around Milan including Rho, Lacchiarella and Magenta, and from Pavia and Piedmont. Lombardy holds 67 active data centers, about one third of the national total, and 60 percent of Italy's pending authorization requests sit in the province of Milan, according to the same report.
The network sent its moratorium request to the government and the environment ministry on Oct. 9, [Il Post](https://www.ilpost.it/2026/10/18/movimento-stop-data-center-italia) reported. It wants projects assessed cumulatively across a wider area, not one at a time.
The protest targets Regional Law 11/2026, Lombardy's first data center framework, approved by the regional council in June. The law steers new facilities toward disused industrial land. Massimo Sertori, the regional councillor for energy resources and local authorities, said the law will be tightened within a month. The Council of Ministers has separately designated 10 data center campuses as a matter of preeminent national strategic interest, Il Giorno reported.
Grid demand runs ahead of the legal debate. Terna, Italy's transmission system operator, lists 553 pending data center connection applications totaling 101.36GW, according to L'Indipendente. The data center observatory at the Politecnico di Milano puts the Milan metropolitan area at 68 percent of Italy's installed data center power, or 414MW, Anadolu Agency reported.
Mario Fritella, a spokesperson for the network, said the facilities consume water and power, occupy land, and add to rising temperatures.
"It is absurd that activities with such an impact are authorized in large numbers without even a national law, and with a regional law that is full of holes because it trades land and our health for money," Fritella said, according to Il Giorno. Fabiana Di Pino, a coordinator of the network, told Il Post the group does not reject technology but opposes the concentration of projects. "We do not want these facilities to have such an impact on a single area," Di Pino said.
Opposition has already changed some outcomes. East Gate withdrew a planned 120MW data center in Travagliato, in the province of Brescia, in September, about 10 months after it filed the project. Cologno Monzese's city council unanimously rejected an 80MW project at the former Torriani industrial site in October.
Baxtel tracks 103 data center sites in the Milan market, operated by 42 providers, with 19 under construction. The largest is Compass's Milan site at 48MW, and Italy as a whole has 155 facilities.
The network said it will take part in a European demonstration in November, with the host city to be announced, Il Sud Milano reported.
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