Digital Realty has announced a major expansion into Portugal with the acquisition of a data centre facility in Lisbon, marking the company’s first infrastructure presence in the country. The move strengthens the firm’s Southern European strategy and positions Lisbon as a central node for global digital connectivity linking Europe with multiple continents.
Lisbon is increasingly recognized as a strategic digital gateway along the Atlantic, offering low latency connectivity between Europe and the Americas. The newly acquired facility is designed to support up to 2.4 megawatts of IT capacity and already hosts several major network service providers. This existing ecosystem gives the site immediate interconnection capabilities, allowing cloud platforms, telecom networks and enterprise operators to access global data routes efficiently.
Portugal’s geographical position on the Iberian Peninsula has attracted growing investment from the data centre and telecommunications sectors. The country serves as a key connection point for multiple subsea cable systems that link Europe to North America, South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. These networks carry a significant share of global internet traffic and are critical to maintaining fast and reliable digital communications.
establishing infrastructure directly in Lisbon, Digital Realty is able to place computing capacity closer to subsea cable landing stations. Previously, much of the company’s subsea connectivity operations were routed through its facilities in Madrid. The Lisbon expansion helps reduce latency shortening the physical distance between data infrastructure and the cables that transport information across oceans.
The selected site sits near the major submarine cable landing area in Carcavelos, making it one of the closest data centre locations to the cable systems that arrive on the Portuguese coast. This proximity allows the facility to support cable landing operations and host termination equipment that enables high capacity data exchange between continents.
Portugal also holds a unique position in Europe due to its direct subsea cable links with South America. In addition, the country provides important connectivity routes to West Africa while offering alternative paths that diversify traffic away from more congested Mediterranean networks. Route diversity is considered essential in modern digital infrastructure because it reduces the risk of service disruption and improves resilience across global networks.
Digital Realty’s leadership highlighted Lisbon as a key component of the company’s broader European strategy. The firm operates under its global PlatformDIGITAL framework, which allows businesses to deploy digital infrastructure across multiple cities while maintaining consistent connectivity and operational standards.
The Lisbon facility is expected to become operational in early 2027, with additional space reserved for future campus expansion. This long term development plan reflects the growing demand for high capacity data infrastructure driven cloud computing, enterprise digital transformation and artificial intelligence workloads.
The new site will also strengthen digital connections between Europe and Africa. Through subsea cable systems, Lisbon links to Digital Realty campuses located in Accra in Ghana, Lagos in Nigeria and Cape Town in South Africa. These corridors enable technology companies, cloud providers and global enterprises to move large volumes of data between regions with improved speed and reliability.
Across the Iberian Peninsula, Digital Realty continues to build an interconnected infrastructure network. The company currently operates four major data centres in Madrid and plans to launch operations in Barcelona in 2026. Together, Lisbon, Madrid and Barcelona create a regional platform that offers customers geographic redundancy, resilient infrastructure and flexible connectivity options across Southern Europe.
