Microsoft has followed recent moves by rivals Google and Amazon Web Services by announcing a major expansion of its cloud business in Italy. The company pledged to invest USD 1.5 billion to build a Milan-based data centre region, its first in the country, with a view to providing "digital skilling and smart-working programmes", SME acceleration, sustainability programmes as well as access to AI Hubs under a five-year plan dubbed "Ambizione Italia: Digital Restart". It expects the new region to generate more than 10,000 job-related opportunities and some USD 9 billion in direct and indirect business impact by the end of 2024.
To enable accelerated productivity and innovation for all Italian businesses, Microsoft is also teaming up with selected partners, including Borsa Italiana, Cariplo Factory, Confindustria, EY, OGR Tech, Politecnico di Milano, Poste Italiane, Sace, UniCredit and Vodafone Italia, to create digital programmes for local businesses with a specific focus on SMEs, offering Microsoft’s cloud services to an estimated 500,000 companies and startups in Italy. The aim is to provide companies with access to Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365, among other Microsoft tools.
It also announced plans to extend its existing partnership with the Italian post office (Poste Italiane) to help the state-controlled company continue its digital transformation. Under the enhanced collaboration, two companies will launch a joint plan to develop a new digital skilling project for the Poste Italiane workforce and a joint initiative for skilling in the country. Poste Italiane will also accelerate its own digital transformation with the latest Microsoft solutions.
The company’s Italian cloud drive comes just a week after AWS inaugurated a data centre region in Milan and a month after Google launched its partnership Telecom Italia to collaborate on new cloud and edge computing services for Italian companies and the public administration.
