Hola, Madrid! Our newest availability zone is live!

We've just added Madrid as a live availability zone and it's one we've been looking forward to for a while. Madrid has quietly become one of the strongest interconnection cities in Southern Europe, and the timing to deploy there finally made sense.

You can select Madrid as your deployment region right now.

The tier III facility and location

Our Madrid AZ runs in IaaS Datacenter Madrid, a carrier-neutral facility, built to Tier III standards, at Calle Maratón 12, 28037 Madrid in the San Blas-Canillejas district. If you want to verify it yourself, it's listed in PeeringDB which is a good starting point for anyone doing due diligence on a new deployment location.

San Blas-Canillejas isn't a name that shows up in travel guides, but in data center terms it's the densest cluster of fiber networks in Madrid. Several carrier-neutral facilities have converged in this district over the years, which is exactly what you want if you care about operator diversity and cross-connect options.

The facility itself is a purpose-built, standalone building and was recognized with a "newly built data center" award by DatacenterMarket (DCM Awards). They have a detailed write-up of the engineering design, including the cooling approach and heat reuse setup. Worth reading if you want specifics: DatacenterMarket PDF write-up. Third-party facilities coverage from enerTIC also covers the ENS compliance (Esquema Nacional de Seguridad) and the electromagnetic shielding in detail if you're serving public-sector or regulated customers in Spain: enerTIC profile.

Latency and routing quality for Spain and Portugal

There's a straightforward case here and a less obvious one. The obvious case is latency: if your users are in Spain or Portugal, deploying in Central Europe and hoping for the best costs you real milliseconds.

A Google Cloud engineer published measured round-trip times from Spain showing roughly a 20ms improvement for workloads moved from Belgium to Madrid. For web apps and APIs that's noticeable. For game servers or anything realtime, it matters a lot more than that.

The less obvious case is routing quality. Spain has historically had some ISP routing quirks that meant traffic could take strange detours even if the raw distance wasn't that bad. Madrid has gotten significantly better at this because of how much exchange capacity has been built up there. When you peer at the local exchanges you get direct paths to the Spanish ISPs and content networks without the hairpin routes that used to be unavoidable.

Internet exchanges and peering

DE-CIX Madrid describes itself as the heart of the largest neutral interconnection ecosystem in Southern Europe and on their location page they explicitly list direct links to DE-CIX Lisbon, Barcelona, Marseille, and Frankfurt. That's not just Southern Europe reach: it's a clean path into the wider European interconnection fabric from a single connection point.

Then there's ESpanix, Spain's main national exchange. ESpanix recently published that it has consolidated above 2 Tbps in peak switched traffic and separately documented breaking the 2 Tbps barrier a few months prior. For context, that puts it firmly in the same weight class as the larger European exchanges. The "small market" framing for Spain's internet infrastructure doesn't really hold anymore.

Madrid as a market: Capacity and growth numbers

SpainDC's industry report puts Madrid at 194.5 MW of installed data center capacity in 2024, a 32.31% year-over-year increase. That kind of growth rate doesn't happen in a vacuum: it comes with carrier investment, more network options, and real competition in colocation and connectivity pricing. The full report is publicly available if you want the detailed breakdown: SpainDC report on the data centre industry in Spain.

Broader market projections put Madrid's data center capacity growing from around 126 MW in 2025 to roughly 763 MW by 2029. Whether or not those exact numbers land, the direction is clear: this is one of the fastest-growing data center markets in Europe right now, and it's attracting hyperscaler and carrier investment at a rate that benefits everyone who operates infrastructure there.

One honest note: fast growth also puts real pressure on the electricity grid. Spanish business press has been covering this actively, with operators pushing back on concerns about overcapacity and simultaneously calling for accelerated grid investment. It's a sign of how real the buildout is, and it's also why facility selection and power planning still matter even in a healthy market.

Subsea cable landings and Iberian connectivity

Madrid is inland, but it benefits from something coastal: the Iberian Peninsula has become a major landing point for transatlantic and intercontinental subsea cables, and Madrid is where that traffic gets aggregated and distributed onward into Europe.

A few concrete examples:

• MAREA is a high-capacity transatlantic cable that lands in Bilbao and connects into the European backbone. MAREA cable overview
• Grace Hopper, Google's transatlantic cable, landed near Bilbao via Telxius. Telxius Grace Hopper landing
• Telxius has also built out the Derio Communications Hub near Bilbao to handle the capacity from these systems and route it onward. Telxius Derio hub announcement

This is why Madrid's interconnection story keeps improving: more cables landing on the Iberian coasts means more diversity in the paths that ultimately run through the city, and more pressure on operators to maintain good exchange capacity to handle the volume.

When Madrid makes sense for your architecture

The honest answer is anyone whose users are primarily in Spain or Portugal. But there are a few specific cases where Madrid becomes an easy call:

• SaaS products with a Spanish or Portuguese customer base where API latency shows up in dashboards
• Game servers where routing unpredictability is the difference between playable and frustrating
• A second availability zone to complement a Central European primary, giving you genuine geographic diversity without going too far
• Regulated workloads that need to stay within Spain because of GDPR data residency or sector requirements, with ENS-aligned infrastructure being the baseline expectation

Deploy in Madrid

Madrid is live now. Select it as your deployment region from the dashboard. If you have questions about architecture decisions or want to talk through a specific use case, reach out.