The goal of making Greece a hub for data traffic and storage, connecting the Middle East and Africa with Europe, seems feasible, with the ongoing investments of US tech giants and Greek companies.
According to Giorgos Psyrris, director of Grid Telecom (subsidiary of the Independent Power Transmission Operator – IPTO) investments in data centers and submarine cables will exceed 2 billion euros in the coming years. Based on the data recently presented at a Smartpress conference, the data centers today are 13 and will become 24 with their total power reaching 139 MW from 34 MW.
Technologies such as cloud computing, IoT (internet of things), AI (artificial intelligence) and big data make the development of data centers necessary, in order to reduce the delay in the transfer of data.
Psyrris underlined that investors in this ecosystem, that will contribute overall to the development of the economy, choose the country where they will set up their infrastructure based first of all on political and economic stability. They need reliable and sufficient electricity produced as much as possible from renewable sources, specialized workers, and strong telecommunications networks while they prefer areas close to large urban centers.
Among the leaders in the creation of data centers in this phase are Digital Realty and Microsoft.
