On July 6, 2023, a torrential storm collapsed the Barranco de la Muerte in Zaragoza, leaving the Z-30 under two meters of water and causing damage valued at 125 million euros, as collects The Herald. Among the affected structures, the high-speed train between Madrid and Barcelona and the capital’s main ring road. This natural disaster made it clear that Zaragoza lacked hydraulic infrastructure capable of absorbing extreme weather events, increasingly frequent with climate change, such as explains AEMET.
In response, the City Council made a plan structured in three phases and began conversations with Amazon Web Services, the hyperscaler that Aragón has chosen for its data centers in Spain: the result is a public-private alliance that combines hydraulic infrastructure and real-time monitoring technology with the aim of turning Zaragoza into a European benchmark for urban resilience.
Zaragoza, flood-proof. The Zaragoza City Council and AWS with the collaboration of the Government of Aragon and the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation have agreed implement a global technological and hydraulic strategy for environmental risk management. Amazon will contribute 13.8 million euros, distributed in three annual installments. The collaboration has two legs: a physical one, with the construction of hydraulic infrastructure in the Barranco de la Muerte; and another technological, with the deployment of an intelligent early warning platform based on the AWS cloud.
Why is it important. This system will benefit more than 700,000 people who live in the Aragonese capital, in addition to protecting critical infrastructure for the city such as the Z-30, the train and entire neighborhoods such as Parque Venecia, today exposed to intense storms. Beyond the scope of the work, this is one of the few cases in Spain where a large technology company directly finances public civil protection infrastructure as a condition of its installation in the territory, which puts a question on the table: what the companies that consume the most resources can and should contribute to the cities that host them.
Context. AWS maintains one of the largest investment plans in digital infrastructure in Spain: in 2024 announced an investment of 15.7 billion euros in Aragon over the next decade to expand its cloud infrastructure and new data center campuses in Villanueva de Gállego, El Burgo de Ebro and Huesca. This expansion has a B side: enormous pressure on the territory’s electrical, water and transportation networks.
The Barranco de la Muerte is not an isolated case: the Valencia DANA of October 2024 left more than 220 dead and politically accelerated the demand for drainage infrastructure in vulnerable urban areas. Zaragoza, with active ravines and a climate prone to intense convective storms, is one of them.
How are they going to do it?. From the point of view of hydraulic works, it is a lamination of avenues combined with sustainable urban drainage enhanced with real-time monitoring. The plan is divided into three technical phases. The first, financed by the council and already underway, consists of a perimeter canal and a retaining wall around the Barranco de la Muerte. The second, financed by AWS, adds a storm tank next to the Torrero Cemetery with a capacity for 20,000 cubic meters, five lamination dams and the improvement of the existing ones upstream of Z-40. The third would bury the ravine as it passes through Z-30 with a collector that would double the current drainage capacity.
Added to this is a cloud platform that will combine sensors, artificial intelligence and real-time analysis to monitor flows and launch early warnings. That is to say: the physical infrastructure retains and laminates the water, and the technological infrastructure anticipates when and how much will arrive. AWS support is not only financial: it provides digitalization and predictive hydraulics that multiply the effectiveness of physical infrastructure.
Yes, but. The collaboration is a real advance for the city, but it raises uncomfortable questions. The first is obvious: Amazon does not pay for these works out of altruism: its data centers in Aragon are voracious consumers of water and energy, so building water infrastructure in the city is a win-win: it minimizes the risk of supply failures in the event of potential natural disasters and improves its image while strengthening ties with the authorities. Water management is one of the thorny points of data centers and with its proliferation increases scrutiny and protests over the consumption of a scarce good, such as Amazon has already suffered itself in Aragon.
On the other hand, for the alert technological platform to be useful, it will be an essential requirement that it be accompanied by proven evacuation and response protocols, which turns an alert into a real solution. How they plan to do it is something that has not been publicly disclosed at the moment.
In Xataka | Quietly, Aragón is becoming a data center “powerhouse”: now it has taken a crucial step
Cover | David Vives and AWS
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