What a report on infrastructure investment is really telling Italian and European tourism

When I opened PwC's infrastructure outlook report, my first reaction was detachment — the same feeling I'd had with the DeepSeek finance news. A document talking about roads, bridges, electricity grids, data centres and billions of dollars of capital doesn't seem to have much to do with the day-to-day running of a small independent hotel. But the more I read, the more I realised that beneath the macro numbers lies a very concrete map of the risks and opportunities our sector will have to navigate over the next twenty years — a map that rarely enters industry conversations because it looks like a topic for engineers, not hoteliers.

The numbers, first

The report, built together with Oxford Economics, estimates that global annual infrastructure spending will rise from $4.4 trillion in 2024 to $6.9 trillion by 2050, for a cumulative investment exceeding $151 trillion across the whole period. The figure that struck me most, though, is the regional one: expected growth is 1.6 times in the Americas, but only 1.4 times in Europe. That's not a small difference. It means that Europe, in the global competition to modernise transport, energy, water and digital systems, is moving at a slower pace at exactly the moment when international tourism competition increasingly plays out on the quality of the infrastructure behind the traveller's experience — not just on the beauty of the place.

The most direct connection: digital infrastructure and data centres

The chapter most closely related to the topics we've covered in recent weeks on Officina Turistica is the one on data centres. The report estimates that global annual investment in data-centre buildings will grow 2.2 times in just a few years, from €97.3 billion in 2024 to €215.3 billion in 2027, with cumulative investment exceeding €1,280 billion between 2024 and 2032. Every time we talk about JSON-LD, AI booking assistants or conversational search engines deciding whether and how a hotel appears in a query, we're talking about tools that physically run on these data centres, consume enormous amounts of energy and compete for the same electricity grid we're also connected to. This is not an abstract technical detail: the race to artificial intelligence that we've been describing as an opportunity for our sector carries a real infrastructural cost, which also feeds into the energy prices we pay as accommodation providers — especially in a country like Italy where energy costs already weigh heavily on a hotel's accounts.

The risk the report describes better than anyone else: execution

The most honest part of the report — and the one I find most useful for our reality — is the chapter on the risks that can dilute the impact of these investments: fragmented planning, inconsistent community involvement, supply-chain vulnerabilities, obsolete delivery models. Anyone managing a property in Italy will immediately recognise this list, because it describes with precision the reasons why so many infrastructure projects in our country sit frozen for years or get delivered only half-finished. This isn't a problem any individual hotelier can solve, but it is a risk that needs to be factored into long-term planning — for instance, when you're banking on the arrival of a new railway line, the upgrading of the water network or the extension of digital connectivity to a rural area or a historic village.

Water and energy: where infrastructure really touches our daily lives

Here I'm speaking directly from experience. I run an eco-boutique hotel in a territory — the Cinque Terre and the Ligurian coast — where water availability during peak tourism months is a real issue, not a theoretical one, and where the fragility of the water and electricity grid in hilly, sparsely urbanised areas makes itself felt every summer. The report, in its institutional-investor language, speaks of water and social systems as sectors set to grow roughly 1.5 times by 2050, but for anyone running a property in a village of a few thousand inhabitants that hosts tens of thousands in August, the real question isn't how much global investment will grow — it's how quickly it will arrive, and whether it will arrive at all, in their specific territory. The practical lesson I take from this — and one I often recommend to the clients I advise — is not to build your long-term strategy on the expectation that public infrastructure will arrive on time. It makes more sense to invest, where possible, in your own direct autonomy: water collection and management systems, energy efficiency, backup connectivity — everything a property can control without depending on the often very long timescales of Italian public planning.

What this means for those working in Italian and European tourism

The picture that emerges, read through the eyes of our sector, is neither alarmist nor reassuring — it's simply realistic. Europe will invest less and more slowly than the Americas in modernising its infrastructure over the next twenty-five years, at a moment when demand for digital connectivity, reliable energy and efficient transport is growing precisely because of the artificial intelligence we are all learning to use in our daily work. Italy, with its well-established difficulty in delivering public works on schedule, is particularly exposed to the execution risks the report describes so clearly. For a destination or an individual property, this translates into one very concrete piece of advice: keep pushing for and supporting the necessary public investments — from the water network to digital connectivity in historic villages — but plan your business assuming those investments will arrive later and more uncertainly than the big global numbers suggest, and in the meantime build your infrastructural resilience around what you can actually control yourself.

FAQ

Q: How much will infrastructure spending in Europe grow by 2050?

A: According to the PwC–Oxford Economics report, European infrastructure spending will grow roughly 1.4 times by 2050 — a slower pace than the 1.6 times projected for the Americas.

Q: Why does the growth of data centres matter to tourism?

A: Because the AI tools increasingly used in tourism — from hotel search to booking — run on data centres that consume large amounts of energy, with a potential knock-on effect on the energy costs of accommodation properties.

Q: What can an Italian accommodation property do in the face of delays in public infrastructure?

A: It can invest in its own direct autonomy — for example in efficient water management, energy efficiency and backup connectivity — rather than counting on the often very long timescales of public infrastructure planning.