A Law Built Around One Number
Lombardy hosts 63% of all new data-centre applications filed in Italy and already operates 67 of the country's 168 facilities, according to reporting by Il Sole 24 Ore. On May 26, 2026, the Lombardy Regional Council answered that concentration with Regional Law No. 11/2026 — formally Legge Regionale 3 giugno 2026, n. 11, "Disposizioni in materia di insediamento di centri dati," published in BURL n. 23 and in force from June 20, 2026. It is Italy's first regional statute dedicated entirely to data centre siting, and its mechanism is a price signal rather than a ban: build on agricultural land and the construction contribution doubles; build inside a park or protected area under the 1983 regional land law and it triples. Build on a disused industrial site, contaminated land, or a closed mine or quarry, and the law waives the surcharge entirely and fast-tracks the permit through a new regional one-stop shop, according to the official statutory text.
The Case for Guardrails
The strongest argument for the law isn't aesthetic NIMBYism — it's a genuine coordination problem. Roughly €11 billion of the €22 billion in data-centre investment currently flowing into Italy is aimed at Lombardy, per Il Sole 24 Ore's reporting, concentrated around Milan, which alone counts 33 active facilities, 10 under construction, and 23 more under evaluation. Land-use decisions made under 20th-century industrial zoning rules were never built to arbitrate between hyperscale campuses and the region's shrinking agricultural belt, and once concrete and cooling infrastructure go into farmland, that soil consumption is effectively permanent. A regulator watching hundreds of megawatts of applications pile up with no siting framework at all has a legitimate case for intervening before the market decides the geography by default. Osborne Clarke's analysis of the law notes it treats a data centre as "a complex productive settlement" tied to land, water, and grid capacity — not just a technology deployment — which is a fair description of what these facilities actually are at gigawatt scale.
Where the Law Gets the Instrument Right
What distinguishes Lombardy's approach from blunter data-localisation instruments elsewhere is that it prices an externality instead of gatekeeping the sector. The surcharge only bites on the specific choice — greenfield or protected land — that the region wants to discourage; it does not cap capacity, require domestic ownership, or condition permits on data residency. Operators retain a genuine choice, and the law backs that choice with real inducements: Article 3 allows a 10–30% contribution reduction for projects that recover waste heat for district heating, and the brownfield track gets procedural acceleration on top of the fee waiver. That combination — penalize the externality, subsidize the preferred behavior, leave the decision to the firm — is the proportionate-regulation model this publication has argued for in EU data-centre and energy siting debates generally: it changes relative prices rather than picking winners by fiat.
Where the Calculus Tips
The law is not without real risk to Italy's competitiveness. The final surcharges — 100% and 200% — are far steeper than the 50–75% range originally proposed, a change driven by a floor amendment from Lega group leader Alessandro Corbetta, according to multiple Italian outlets covering the May 26 vote, where three Democratic Party councillors abstained and three walked out. Steep surcharges only function as intended if brownfield capacity actually exists where operators need it — near substations and fiber trunks, not simply wherever an old quarry happens to sit. Article 6 of the law gives municipalities 365 days to inventory disused and contaminated sites; until those maps exist, developers face a real surcharge against a hypothetical brownfield alternative, which functions less like an incentive and more like a straightforward tax increase. Grid-adjacency and power-availability constraints, not zoning categories, are usually the binding constraint on where a hyperscale facility can actually go — a brownfield site with no 50MW+ substation nearby doesn't solve anything, it just relocates the same environmental trade-off.
The Broader Signal
Lombardy's law also plugs into the EU's Delegated Regulation 2024/1364, which already requires operators above 500kW to report standardized sustainability KPIs to a common European database — meaning Lombardy is layering land-use price signals onto data that facilities are already obligated to disclose, rather than inventing a parallel reporting burden. That is a sensible sequencing choice other Italian regions and EU member states are likely to study as more countries confront the same collision between AI-driven data-centre demand and finite land and grid capacity. If Lombardy pairs its price signal with a fast, genuinely usable brownfield inventory, this becomes a template: proportionate, market-compatible siting discipline instead of the moratoria and localisation mandates several other jurisdictions have reached for. If the brownfield map slips, the 200% surcharge risks becoming exactly the kind of blunt cost-of-doing-business tax that pushes investment toward regions with no siting framework at all — undermining the law's own environmental goal.