The Spanish solar developer is betting that co-locating renewable generation with battery storage adjacent to data centres is the answer to AI's power hunger, and investors are oversubscribed at 6.7x.

Europe has a data centre problem. Electricity grids across the continent are struggling to keep pace with the power demands of the AI boom, planning systems are slow, and the queues for grid connection in markets like the UK, Ireland, and Germany stretch years into the future.

Solaria, the Spanish solar developer listed on the Madrid stock exchange, thinks it has found a way around all three bottlenecks at once.

The company raised €299.88 million on Wednesday through a private placement of up to 10% of its share capital. The raise was 6.7 times oversubscribed across its entire price range by top-tier international institutional investors, at €24 per share.

The proceeds will fund two interlocking strategies: accelerating Solaria's ‘Powered Land' data centre platform, which provides hyperscalers and colocation operators with renewable-powered sites that already have grid connections secured; and significantly scaling its battery energy storage system (BESS) hybrid programme, combining solar farms with wind and storage to deliver reliable, dispatchable power.

The oversubscription level is the most telling detail. For a capital raise of this size, at a moment when Spanish solar stocks have been under pressure from weak power prices driven by record hydro output and capacity additions in 2025, 6.7x demand signals that institutional investors are pricing in Solaria's data centre pivot rather than its current generation economics.

Solaria's proposition to data centre operators is simple to state and hard to replicate. The company operates more than 70 solar plants across Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Germany, connected by a private electrical infrastructure comprising approximately 1,000 kilometres of networks and 97 substations.

That infrastructure took over two decades to assemble and comes with something data centre developers currently find almost impossible to obtain quickly: confirmed grid connection capacity.

The company's ‘Powered Land' model offers data centre operators sites adjacent to existing or under-construction solar capacity, with grid connection pre-secured, electrical infrastructure already built, and long-term renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs) attached. The operator plugs in; Solaria handles the energy.

As of its November 2025 Capital Markets Day, Solaria had assembled a 3.4 GW portfolio of secured data centre capacity across five countries, with its largest concentrations in Italy (1.4 GW) and Germany (1.2 GW), followed by the UK and Spain.

The company has already signed two landmark deals with Merlin Properties, the Spanish REIT, for a combined 438 MW of data centre capacity, backed by 40-year solar PPAs totalling 871 MW and a 10-year BESS contract for 600 MWh of storage.

A third deal is reportedly in late-stage discussions for an additional 500 MW. The company projects that its data centre business will generate €700 million in revenues over the next five years, with Spanish data centre contracts alone covering 80% of its infrastructure services revenue target.

The second use of proceeds addresses the central weakness of solar-only energy supply for data centres: intermittency. A hyperscale data centre cannot run on solar power alone; it needs 24/7 dispatchable power, which means storage. Solaria's answer is a large-scale hybridisation programme that will add wind generation and BESS to its existing solar portfolio across Iberia.

The company has committed to investing €770 million in capital to hybridise its solar parks, targeting 500 MW of wind and 4 GWh of BESS in Iberia by end-2028. At the pan-European level, it has assembled a 5.1 GW storage development portfolio, of which 1.9 GW already holds secured connection permits, and targets 6.4 GWh of total European BESS capacity by 2028.

The JV with Stoneshield Capital, Gravyx, holds a 14 GWh European storage portfolio and is designed to develop standalone battery projects outside Solaria's core hybrid strategy.

The rationale is financial as well as operational. BESS units co-located with solar farms benefit from elevated gas spreads, the gap between daytime solar-depressed power prices and evening gas-fired prices, generating revenue through energy arbitrage and capacity payments that partially insulate Solaria from the low Spanish solar prices currently weighing on its 2026 EBITDA guidance.

Solaria's raise is a direct response to what is becoming one of the defining infrastructure challenges of the AI era. US utilities alone plan to spend $1.4 trillion by 2030 on electricity infrastructure to keep pace with data centre demand. In Europe, the situation is no less urgent: the IEA projects data centre electricity consumption will exceed 1,000 TWh globally by 2026, roughly equivalent to Japan's entire electricity consumption, as TNW has previously covered.

Grid connection queues in Germany, the UK, and Ireland, Solaria's key target markets alongside its home base in Spain and Italy, mean that a data centre operator starting the planning process today may wait three to five years for a connection.

Solaria's model short-circuits that delay by offering access to the capacity it has already secured. The 6.7x oversubscription of Wednesday's raise suggests the market agrees that this is a genuinely scarce resource rather than a repackaged solar story.

The company's financials support the pivot. Solaria reported record EBITDA of €266 million in 2025, 32% above 2024 and 6% above its own guidance, on revenues of €303 million, up 27%.

Its infrastructure business, the segment that includes data centre and storage revenues, grew 70% in 2025. RBC Capital Markets upgraded the stock to Outperform in March 2026, raising its price target and increasing its EBITDA estimates by approximately 14% on average for 2026–2028 after incorporating data centre revenues and battery storage capacity.

Whether Solaria can convert its pipeline into contracted revenue at the pace the market is now pricing in is the question that Wednesday's €300 million will have to answer.