Why Italy is Europe’s Next Cloud Expansion Hotspot

By Emmanuel Sevray, VP Sales

With a growing network sector, flourishing digital landscape, and exciting growth targets, there’s never been a better time to expand your business to Italy.

Italy has long been known for its rich history, culture, cuisine, and natural beauty. But beyond tourism, Italy is an economic powerhouse and a growing player in the global tech scene. In recent years the country has experienced impressive growth, emerging as one of the largest economies in Europe.

Now Italy is at an exciting inflection point with its expanding cloud market, offering the perfect chance for businesses to modernize their operations and add a competitive edge to their presence in the European market.

Whether you’re an enterprise trying to grow internationally or a small-medium sized business searching for new market opportunities, Italy’s immense potential is waiting to be harnessed. And for companies already in Italy, their cloud capabilities are expanding quickly.

An economic powerhouse

Italy is one of the largest economies in Europe—and the world—with a GDP of over $2 trillion. This number is forecast to continue growing, with real GDP projected to increase by a YoY total of 1.2% in 2025. Infrastructure providers are looking to the business hub of Milan as a priority, bringing in over 440 million euros of the country’s GDP. As Italy’s most populated city, Rome trails behind at just over 212 million euros.

According to Hit Horizons, Italy’s most popular industry is services, with just over 25% total market share. Retail, finance, construction, and manufacturing are also highly profitable sectors.

The Italian Government’s digital adoption plan

AWS Italy reports that currently, only 39% of Italian companies have taken up key technologies such as the cloud, but the Italian Government is committed to increasing digital adoption. As an appealing target for cloud and infrastructure providers, Milan is expected to lead the growth, followed by Rome.

Millions of euros have been dedicated to enabling and facilitating nationwide digital transformation in the areas of:

• Cloud migration: Datasets and applications of local public administrations will be migrated to a secure cloud infrastructure. By June 2026, 12,464 administrations will have migrated to certified cloud environments, up from 4,083 in September 2024.
• Digital infrastructure: Public administration systems, datasets, and applications are set to be hosted in reliable data centers with high security, performance, scalability, European interoperability, and energy efficiency. At least 280 entities between central administrations and local health authorities will have migrated to the National Strategic Hub by June 2026, up from 100 in September 2024.
• Digital services and citizenship: The aim is to develop integrated, state-of-the-art, citizen-oriented digital services and ensure widespread adoption to improve user experience. This will improve digital services offered to citizens as a result of transforming core elements of the public administration’s digital architecture.

Local cloud infrastructure growth

Italy’s public cloud market is already thriving, and is expected to reach a worth of more than €6.4 billion by 2027. Systems integrators and managed service providers are also widespread, and are a highly popular component of local business architectures. This cloud market is set to grow and expand alongside its supporting infrastructure.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the Italian data center construction market is set to hit several major milestones by 2029:

• Registered CAGR of 14.82%
• IT load capacity of 805.2 MW
• Total of 268,408 racks installed, with greater Milan likely to house the majority
• Market share of massive-sized data centers is expected to increase from 8.2% in 2022 to about 34%.

Many Italian enterprises are choosing hybrid cloud to modernize legacy applications, while leveraging public cloud for new application development. As infrastructure allows, multicloud architectures are expected to skyrocket in popularity with local enterprises so they can avoid vendor lock-in and optimize costs, security, and performance. To manage the growing complexity these architectures bring, such configurations also prompt a need for cloud management tools that can help these local businesses scale.

CSP and percentage market share in Italy

What it all means

There is no shortage of benefits to choosing Italy as your next business expansion point. The country’s market opportunities are set to flourish in the next five years, making it an ideal testbed for new products and services.

Capitalizing on these trends early will give early entrants a stronghold on the market, bring their services to a growing economy, leverage international business opportunities, increase their revenue, and accelerate their digital transformation.

Getting to Italy with Megaport

It might seem overwhelming to break into the Italian networking landscape – but what if someone else had already done the hard work for you?

Whether you’re an Italian business looking to future-proof your network or a global enterprise ready to leverage all the benefits of expanding to Italy, the fastest way to get started is to use a Network as a Service (NaaS) provider with global availability, like Megaport.

Megaport enabled locations are now available in Italy through leading data center providers like AtlasEdge, Data4, Equinix, and Retelit, so you can start networking there in minutes.

When you connect to Italy via Megaport, you’ll get:

• Global presence: In just a few clicks, you can place Megaport’s extensive global network at your fingertips. Get access to more than 850 data centers from over 100 unique data center operators and 280 cloud on-ramps all over the world. Plus, leverage more than 365 service providers including all major cloud providers, data center operators, network service providers, and managed service providers.
• Scalability: Megaport’s elastic network fabric grows alongside you as your network complexifies and expands across regions and industries. Scale services and bandwidth up and down on demand, or on a schedule that aligns with the fluctuating demands of your market, so you’re never overpaying.
• Stability: Megaport aims for 100% uptime on our services so you stay connected to your mission-critical applications with reduced latency and jitter.
• More control: Whether you want to level up your multicloud with Megaport Cloud Router, bring your network to the edge with Megaport Virtual Edge, or establish a dedicated internet connection for your enterprise with Megaport Internet, our extensive suite of solutions give you the control to architect the perfect network. For more services and solutions, visit our Docs Portal or chat to our sales team who can help architect the perfect solution for your needs.

Partnering with a vendor-neutral network infrastructure provider like Megaport launches your organization in the local market in just a few clicks, so you’re primed to harness the vast digital landscape and watch your business flourish.

Our team of local experts can help you kick off your business expansion in Italy. Reach out today.