The digital transition represents one of the most significant strategic challenges for the country's competitiveness. Data centers constitute the enabling infrastructure upon which this transformation is built, ensuring the resilience, security, and scalability of digital services. In this context, artificial intelligence stands as a new industrial pillar destined to redefine economic and productive models on a global scale.
To support this evolution, it is fundamental to develop a liquid, efficient, and accessible capital market capable of catalyzing the necessary investments and accompanying the country's technological growth. Institutions such as Intesa Sanpaolo are the engine of this development, supporting projects from the construction phase, with project finance structures, through to the refinancing phase on the capital market using securitization structures, similar to those already seen in other sectors, or through bond issuances.
Once an asset is operational, turning to capital markets allows data center companies to optimize their debt structure and enables banks to reallocate capital to finance new developments. Adherence to sustainability principles is fundamental from every perspective in the development of datacenters. Hyperscalers, the primary users of datacenters, insist on these principles themselves. An example of this is the Community First AI Infrastructure Plan document, published at the beginning of 2026 by Microsoft.
The majority of the projects that the IMI Corporate and Investment Banking Division structures and finances contain sustainability KPIs, both regarding the use of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency in liquid cooling technologies. With the growth of the sector, it is expected that in the future all datacenters will be developed in adherence to environmental and social sustainability principles and with a view toward circularity.
