The Spanish Data Centre Association (Spain DC) said Huawei, Legrand, Schneider Electric (EPA: SU) and Siemens have joined the industry body as “main partners”.

The main partners programme is limited to four members and is the closest form of collaboration with stakeholders and the association itself.

SpainDC said it is designed to actively promote interaction between data centres, suppliers and other players in the sector, in order to underpin the growth of the industry and accelerate Spain’s digital transformation.

The four main partners were presented at an event held in Madrid in which Spain DC also presented the actions carried out since its foundation and shared the roadmap for 2022.

Ignacio Velilla and Manuel Giménez, president and executive director of Spain DC respectively, highlighted the incorporation of four new associates (data centre companies) and eight partners (other companies from complementary sectors), as well as the success achieved in its public exposure and institutional relations campaign to raise awareness of the sector and publicise its challenges and its strategy for tackling them.

“One of the objectives is to offer a complete overview of the data centre sector in order to contextualise its contribution to the Spanish economy and its potential in terms of employment and investment attraction,” the association said.

Within this framework, Spain DC made public the collaboration agreement signed this month with the Madrid Association of Economists (CEMAD), with whom it is already working to promote knowledge and the implementation of digital infrastructures.

As part of this agreement, the ‘I Study on the state of Data Centers in Spain’, prepared in collaboration with ICADE, will be presented in full in January.

The report yields some conclusions that confirm the growth expectations outlined by the association: in 2026, Madrid will equal and may surpass Paris in installed capacity, one of the four cities that have led the sector in Europe to date, the so-called FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris).

“A possible overtaking that will be possible thanks to an estimated average growth of 42% per year, almost four times higher than that predicted in the four main markets,” SpainDC said in a comms statement.

Elsewhere in 2022, SpainDC said it will continue to work to defend the sector’s interests in energy matters, the roadmap for the coming year includes the creation of working groups, studies and strategic alliances to promote the objectives of training, internationalisation and public-private collaboration.