Malaysian conglomerate Kuok Group is considering investing up to €5.3 billion ($6bn) in a hyperscale data center campus on the southern outskirts of Milan, Teleborsa has reported.Italy's industry minister, Adolfo Urso, met with a delegation from K2 Strategic, Kuok Group’s digital infrastructure arm, led by its CEO, Meng Wei Kuok, on Friday (26 June) to discuss the plans.The project would involve the construction of a data center campus with a capacity of approximately 300MW and the potential to create around 200 direct jobs and up to 8,000 full-time positions during the construction phase.The potential multi-billion-euro investment would cover the development and long-term management of the project.K2 was established in 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kuok Group, owned by Malaysian billionaire Robert Kuok.It functions as an international developer, owner, and operator of hyper-scale digital infrastructure assets and specialises in providing critical digital infrastructure for technology companies.K2 currently has three operational data centers in Ireland and Malaysia and two further facilities under construction in Dublin, according to DataCenterMap.The Lombardy region in northern Italy has become a target for data center development in the country. Milan, in particular, is experiencing a rapid data center expansion driven by AI and tech demand, with the city expected to add 2GW of capacity over the next five years - a tenfold increase from current 200MW levels.Major hyperscalers, including Google, Microsoft, and AWS, already operate cloud regions in the region.This aggressive expansion has also caused local opposition. Residents and local representatives of the town of Magenta, in Lombardy, have been fighting plans to build a 240MW data center campus across five buildings in a former industrial complex.Learn more about the data center market in Italy and Southern Europe, and meet with other executives and experts from the region at the DCN Milan event next year