The Spanish solar developer is banking on co-locating renewable generation and battery storage next to data centers as the solution to AI’s growing power needs, with investors oversubscribed at 6.7 times.
Europe is facing a data center challenge. Power grids across the continent are struggling to meet the energy demands of the AI surge, planning processes are slow, and the lines for grid connections in regions like the UK, Ireland, and Germany extend years into the future.
Solaria, a Spanish solar developer listed on the Madrid stock exchange, believes it has found a way to bypass these three bottlenecks simultaneously.
The company secured €299.88 million on Wednesday through a private placement of up to 10% of its share capital. This was 6.7 times oversubscribed across the entire price range by top-tier international institutional investors, at €24 per share.
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The funds will support two intertwined strategies: speeding up Solaria’s ‘Powered Land’ data center platform, which offers hyperscalers and colocation operators renewable-powered sites with pre-secured grid connections, and expanding its battery energy storage system (BESS) hybrid program, integrating solar farms with wind and storage to provide reliable, dispatchable power.
The oversubscription level is significant. For a capital raise of this size, at a time when Spanish solar stocks are under pressure from weak power prices due to record hydro output and capacity additions in 2025, 6.7x demand indicates that institutional investors see value in Solaria’s data center shift rather than its current generation economics.
Solaria’s offer to data center operators is straightforward yet hard to match. The company operates over 70 solar plants across Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Germany, linked by a private electrical infrastructure of approximately 1,000 kilometers of networks and 97 substations.
This infrastructure, which took more than two decades to build, provides something data center developers currently struggle to secure quickly: confirmed grid connection capacity.
The ‘Powered Land’ model offers data center operators sites next to existing or upcoming solar capacity, with pre-secured grid connection, built-in electrical infrastructure, and long-term renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs). The operator connects; Solaria manages the energy.
As of its November 2025 Capital Markets Day, Solaria had developed a 3.4 GW portfolio of secured data center capacity across five countries, with the largest concentrations in Italy (1.4 GW) and Germany (1.2 GW), followed by the UK and Spain.
The company has already signed two major agreements with Merlin Properties, the Spanish REIT, for a combined 438 MW of data center capacity, supported by 40-year solar PPAs totaling 871 MW and a 10-year BESS contract for 600 MWh of storage.
A third deal is reportedly in advanced talks for an additional 500 MW. The company anticipates its data center business will generate €700 million in revenue over the next five years, with Spanish data center contracts alone accounting for 80% of its infrastructure services revenue target.
The second use of funds addresses the main weakness of solar-only energy supply for data centers: intermittency. A hyperscale data center cannot solely rely on solar power; it requires 24/7 dispatchable power, necessitating storage. Solaria’s solution is a large-scale hybridization plan that will incorporate wind generation and BESS into its existing solar portfolio across Iberia.
The company plans to invest €770 million in capital to hybridize its solar parks, targeting 500 MW