Italy has selected Poste Italiane, its state-owned postal service, to lead a bid for Telecom Italia (TIM) worth €13.5 billion ($15.4 billion), aiming to accelerate its shift into digital, telecom and cloud services and protect digital sovereignty. Poste, which pays out pensions through 12,600 post offices and is two-thirds owned by the state, began its digital transformation in the early 2000s and has signed up 30 million users—around 70% of the total—to Italy's digital ID system. Serving 46 million customers across banking, insurance, telecommunications and energy, Poste argues the tie-up will create a larger state-backed group that can build distributed computing infrastructure across the country, according to a person briefed on the plans. With 125 megawatts of installed data centre capacity, TIM is a top three national operator, though Italy has only around 15% of Germany's installed capacity. Poste-TIM could boost computing capacity at telecom hubs and convert former postal sorting centres into local edge-computing hubs, with TIM's mobile network sites potentially involved in the future. Poste and TIM both declined to comment.