We show that silting modules are closely related with localizations of rings. More precisely, every partial silting module gives rise to a localization at a set of maps between countably generated projective modules and, conversely, every universal localization, in the sense of Cohn and Schofield, arises in this way. To establish these results, we further explore the finite-type classification of tilting classes and we use the morphism category to translate silting modules into tilting objects. In particular, we prove that silting modules are of finite type.