You must be worried, like many residents of Lombardy, about what it means to have one of those server warehouses working day and night nearby. Because all this work generates heat that has to be taken from somewhere: in San Bovio, a small town in the Peschira Borromeo at the gates of Milan, Microsoft is building a data center that will have 45 megawatts of power and will cool its equipment with water extracted directly from the aquifer.
An abandoned place. The project occupies an old tertiary zone that has been unused for more than 15 years and has been decontaminated, and both the company and the city council maintain that it has passed all approval procedures. On the page that Microsoft has dedicated to the work, the company talks about more than ten million euros in urban planning charges, compensation and works for the municipality, in addition to solar panels, new plantations, rainwater recovery and air, water and noise control.
However, none of this reassured those who lived by. Noise, electricity consumption, water pressure and proximity to homes are factors in a neighborhood’s population that have led to a petition with thousands of signatures, as reported by L’Espresso at the end of September 2026.
House within walking distance. “The plant will rise right in the middle of the house,” Wanda Benati, spokeswoman for the San Bovio Committee for Environmental Protection, explained to the fanpage (in a statement translated from Italian). “There are terraces and neighbors’ windows that overlook the area 50 to 100 meters away, which all involve noise and emissions. The whole neighborhood will be affected, because it’s a small town. Just think that the playground where the children go will be separated from the data center only by a fence.”
How to cool a server. The most controversial point is water: servers work non-stop and generate a lot of heat, which must be dissipated to keep everything working. An alternative is evaporative cooling, which uses the evaporation of water to remove heat and, while considerably energy efficient, requires constant water replenishment. Another is closed circuit (so-called “dry cooling”), which works more or less like a car radiator: a liquid circulates through sealed pipes, receiving heat and cooling it from the outside without consuming it, without evaporation, the same principle that Microsoft explained in 2024 for its chips. According to the fanpage, most new data centers built in Italy will rely on this type of solution.
There are also hybrid systems, which run on air most of the year and use a small amount of water in the hottest months, when outside air is not enough to cool the machine down. That is, according to the same media, the formula that Microsoft will use in San Bovio, a facility that it creates for its own use. It’s a decision against the grain of modern systems that minimize water use and has reignited the debate over new data center technology.
Less CO₂, more water. Why choose water? Sources outside Microsoft but involved in the plan told FanPage that the reason is, paradoxically, to minimize CO₂ emissions, and traditional cooling equipment requires a lot of electricity to run continuously. Therefore, collecting water during the hottest time allows us to reduce costs, although it is very delicate for the neighbors to use it.
“It is an area rich in irrigation ditches and fontanilli, including the historic Fontanile Gambarone, which dates back to the 11th century. Its headwaters are only 50 meters from the works,” added Benati (fontanilli are the typical natural springs of the area). “We fear that the withdrawal of water from the aquifer could negatively affect the level of the spring, even during the most critical summer it dries up, which also affects the agriculture of the area.” Neighbors had already warned of the impact on Gambarone, as reported by Il Giorno in August 2026.
Legal, but controversial. According to the fanpage, what Microsoft does is perfectly legal. The Lombard regional law of June 2026 calls for water-efficient cooling systems that avoid drinking or irrigation water, and the San Bovio center will use non-potable water, as the company itself acknowledges on the same project page. It was there that Peschi asked Borromeo’s residents, along with dozens of groups from Lombardy and other regions to join the Stop Data Center Committee network to sit down with the institutions.
“Our intention is not to say no in principle to the progress or development of data centers, but to demand serious regulation. We want a moratorium on deciding where, how and why to build these facilities, so that they are not imposed on citizens,” Benati concluded.
At the national level, data center regulations are still pending: the delegation bill to the government, approved by the Chamber of Deputies in February 2026, is pending in the Senate. Meanwhile, those who are going to do one of these buildings near home want guarantees of use, noise limits and distance from home. They demand a real dialogue with administrations and organizations, so as not to face benefits whose details few know.
Picture | Ismail Enes Ayhan
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