Nebius Signs 18MW Colocation Lease With Merlin Properties in Madrid, Enters Spain
- Nebius has signed an 18MW lease at Merlin Properties' Madrid-Getafe data center campus, its first facility in Spain [1]
- The Madrid-Getafe campus comprises two buildings — MG1 (20MW) and MG2 (48MW) — with a PUE of 1.15 and up to 200kW per rack density [1][4]
- Nebius now operates GPU infrastructure across five European countries: UK, France, Finland, Iceland, and Spain [1]
- Merlin and Edged Energy are separately developing two gigawatt-scale campuses in Extremadura totaling 2GW, after abandoning Andalusia plans over power supply concerns [3][5]
- NBIS shares are up ~158% year-to-date, trading at $215.62 with a $51.7B market cap [6]
Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS) has signed an 18MW colocation lease with Merlin Properties at the Madrid-Getafe data center campus south of Madrid, according to a report by Spanish newspaper El Mundo citing company sources [1]. The deal marks the AI cloud provider's first entry into the Spanish market and extends its European GPU infrastructure footprint to five countries.
The Madrid-Getafe facility is jointly developed and operated by Merlin Properties and Edged Energy, a partnership that dates back to 2021. The campus comprises two buildings — MG1 with 20MW of critical IT capacity and MG2 with 48MW — designed with waterless cooling technology, a portfolio-wide PUE of 1.15, and rack densities up to 200kW via plug-and-play liquid cooling [1][4].
Neither Merlin Properties nor Nebius has officially confirmed the lease terms. Merlin declined to confirm the scale of the agreement to El Mundo, and Edged Energy has not commented publicly [1][2].
The Facility
The Madrid-Getafe campus sits approximately 12-15 km south of central Madrid in the Polígono Industrial Los Ángeles district of Getafe. The site is positioned along a major Spanish fiber and logistics corridor with direct low-latency connections to undersea cable landings in Bilbao, Barcelona, and Lisbon [4].
The 18MW lease would occupy the majority of the MG1 building's 20MW capacity. The campus's MG2 building, with 48MW of capacity, could accommodate future expansion. The facilities are designed to use no water for cooling, which Edged claims reduces energy overhead by 72% compared with the global average [4].
Nebius's European Footprint
With Spain, Nebius now operates AI infrastructure across five European markets. In the UK, the company has signed capacity agreements with Kao Data and Ark DC. In France, it leases capacity from Equinix in Paris. It operates an existing data center in Mäntsälä, Finland, and has infrastructure in Iceland [1].
Nebius had previously explored a larger Spanish presence in Andalusia, but those plans were abandoned in February 2026 due to a lack of guaranteed power supply. Access requests for data centers and large electricity consumers in Spain have reportedly exceeded 100GW, making firm grid connection points a scarce resource that increasingly dictates site selection [5].
Merlin and Edged's Iberian Pipeline
Merlin Properties and Edged Energy have a broader data center pipeline across the Iberian Peninsula, with facilities under development or in operation in Bilbao-Arasur, Madrid-Getafe, Barcelona, and Lisbon. The portfolio could total around 60MW at the end of its first phase and eventually exceed 200MW [3].
The partnership is also developing two gigawatt-scale campuses in Extremadura — at Navalmoral de la Mata in Cáceres Province and Valdecaballeros in Badajoz Province — with each site targeting up to 1GW of capacity. Meta has been reported as a primary customer for Merlin and Edged's existing Spanish facilities [3].
Merlin has raised more than $1 billion for broader data center expansion across Spain and Portugal [3].
Market Context
Nebius shares (NBIS) traded at $215.62 on July 3, down 5.9% on the day, giving the Amsterdam-headquartered company a market capitalization of $51.7 billion. The stock is up approximately 158% year-to-date and 351% over the past twelve months, reflecting investor appetite for GPU cloud infrastructure plays [6].
The Spain lease is the latest in a string of European capacity moves by neocloud operators competing for proximity to enterprise AI workloads. Spain's data center market has attracted increasing attention from hyperscalers and AI infrastructure providers, though grid connection constraints — particularly in Andalusia — have forced developers to concentrate on regions with firmer power supply [5].
Further sources
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