Solaria Signs $5.7 Billion Deal With Uruguay to Build Data Center Park Powered by Its Own Solar Plants

Spanish renewable energy company Solaria Energía y Medio Ambiente signed an agreement with Uruguay’s government on October 14 to develop a data center technology park paired with dedicated solar generation, in a deal worth a combined $5.7 billion, according to multiple reports including Infobae, bne IntelliNews and pv magazine. The government is describing it as the largest investment in the country’s history.

Of the total, roughly $5.5 billion is earmarked for data center construction and about $200 million for the solar plants built to supply it. The combined data center capacity across the project is expected to reach 500 MW, backed by 350 MW of new photovoltaic generation; reporting varies on the exact phase split, with some outlets citing an initial phase of around 200-300 MW of data center capacity paired with roughly 300 MW of solar, scaling up toward the full 500 MW over a second phase. Solaria and the Uruguayan government have not published a detailed phase-by-phase breakdown.

Three Departments, One Free Trade Zone

The park spans the departments of Canelones, San José and Florida: the data centers are planned for Canelones and San José, while the solar generation is sited in Florida department. The development will proceed under Uruguay’s free trade zone regime, which grants tax exemptions to qualifying projects. Construction is expected to continue through 2029, with the government estimating about 3,100 jobs during the build-out and roughly 1,500 permanent positions once the park is fully operational, though other reports cite a lower figure of around 2,500 permanent roles, reflecting the same reporting inconsistency seen in the capacity figures.

Even with 350 MW of dedicated solar, the project’s own backers acknowledge the plants will not fully cover the data centers’ electricity demand on their own, since solar output is intermittent while data centers require continuous power. The agreement does not disclose how the remaining load will be met, whether through grid imports from Uruguay’s hydro- and wind-heavy national system, battery storage, or additional contracted generation.

Uruguay’s Pitch as a Renewable-Powered Data Hub

Uruguay has marketed its electricity system, which already draws heavily on wind, hydropower and biomass, as a selling point for attracting data center investment, alongside incentives such as the free trade zone status used in this deal. Solaria itself is not new to the country: it has operated two small solar plants in Uruguay since the mid-2010s, the 9.5 MW Yarnel plant in Young, Río Negro, and the 9.5 MW Natelu plant in Mercedes, Soriano, selling power to state utility UTE. The new technology park represents a far larger step, moving the company from supplying a national grid operator to building and powering computing infrastructure directly, an approach Solaria has also been pursuing in Europe, where it is reportedly working with Goldman Sachs to find a financing partner for a roughly 3.4 GW data center platform spanning Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK.

The Uruguay deal fits a wider pattern of data center developers pairing new computing capacity with dedicated renewable generation, partly to manage the power procurement timelines that have become a bottleneck for AI and cloud infrastructure in markets with congested grids. In the United States, that same pressure has pushed data center operators toward gas and nuclear power as well: Black Hills Corporation is building a new $1.8 billion gas plant and microgrid for Google’s Wyoming data center, while American Electric Power recently signed a deal for up to 1.6 GW of Mainspring linear generators worth as much as $4 billion, partly to serve rising load from data centers and other large users. Uruguay’s approach, leaning on solar rather than gas or nuclear, reflects the country’s existing renewable-heavy grid rather than a reversal of that model.

An Outsized Deal for a Small Economy

At $5.7 billion, the Solaria agreement is large relative to Uruguay’s economy, a country of roughly 3.4 million people with a GDP in the range of $80 billion. The scale echoes the economics behind Masdar and EWEC’s 5.2 GW solar-plus-storage round-the-clock project in the UAE, where large renewable buildouts are increasingly packaged together with the specific loads, whether desalination, industry or now data centers, that they are built to serve. Whether Uruguay’s grid and transmission infrastructure can absorb a project of this size on the stated 2029 timeline, and how the data centers will source power when the sun is not shining, remain open questions that neither Solaria nor the government have yet detailed publicly.

Sources: Infobae, “Uruguay anunció una inversión de USD 5.700 millones para instalar centros de datos: cinco claves del proyecto,” October 14-15, 2026 (deal terms, phasing, jobs); pv magazine, “Solaria plans 500 MW data center project powered by 350 MW of solar in Uruguay,” October 15, 2026 (capacity figures, locations); bne IntelliNews, “Spain’s Solaria to invest $5.7bn in Uruguay data centres,” October 2026 (investment breakdown); Recharge, background on Solaria’s existing Uruguayan solar plants and IDB financing history.

Illustrative image. Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source