Twenty million euros for the first phase. That is the price of the state's intention to gather its scattered IT systems into one place - a National Data Centre with installed capacity below one megawatt.

The minister for digital transformation, Stefan Andonovski, insists on the scale: „We are not talking about a hyperscale data centre of 50 to 100 megawatts like the commercial data centres being built around the world, but about a small data centre of less than one megawatt of installed capacity.” The maximum over 20 to 25 years, he says, would be five megawatts.

The reason this is being discussed at all is more interesting than the project itself. Today, state systems and equipment are spread across more than twenty smaller data centres and server locations. Twenty separate sites where the state pays for electricity, cooling, uninterruptible power, network and server hardware, physical and cyber security, and maintenance.

Andonovski compared it to managing twenty small fields scattered from Ohrid to Kumanovo and from Skopje to Strumica - each one needing equipment, staff, logistics and security.

The funding comes through the Growth Plan and the Reform Agenda: roughly 30 percent as a grant, the remaining 70 percent under consideration as concessional financing with international partners. Construction is expected to take 24 months, once the environmental assessments are complete and a location is chosen. The systems will not migrate all at once - the critical ones currently housed in inadequate conditions go first.

Now for the questions the announcement does not answer. Who has been running those twenty server rooms all these years, and what did they cost in total? If it is now being said that part of the state's systems sit in „inadequate conditions”, who put them there, and what has been happening to citizens' data in those conditions?

The location has not been chosen. The project is at the feasibility study stage. The technical parameters, the minister says, will be presented publicly before final decisions. That promise is worth remembering - because around here the gap between promised and presented is usually measured in years.