AI: Concern as Germany plans to double data center capacity

In the town of Dietzenbach, near Frankfurt am Main, three US tech companies and one German company have each reserved space for a data center. Dietzenbach, a logistics hub with 35,000 residents, is located close to Frankfurt's airport and is a major financial center in Germany. Plans for a fourth data center have faced opposition from locals due to concerns about rising water and electricity bills, as well as increased temperatures in the town.

Dietzenbach resident Wilhelm Sauer expressed worries about the impact on the community's resources. He, along with other activists, believes the toll on regional resources may not be offset by the limited number of new jobs. Mayor Dieter Lang of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) remains optimistic, predicting that around 100 high-value jobs will come to Dietzenbach through the Google data center and that it will benefit the city's finances through tax contributions.

However, Tara Merk, a researcher on Community Data Centers at the Weizenbaum Institute, is skeptical about the revenue from data centers operated by US companies. She believes that the profits may be taxed elsewhere in Germany. Furthermore, Werner Neumann, a board member of the environmental group BUND, pointed out that there is no official overview of the number of data centers being built or where they are located, as some companies only report smaller projects and not the larger ones.

The German government launched a data centers registry in 2026, listing energy consumption, water consumption, and energy efficiency measures for operating data centers. However, only around 300 data centers are included in the list, while the government estimates that there are about 2,000 data centers running across the country.

A civil society project called Heisse Luft has developed an online map of planned data centers in Germany, updated daily with information from crowdsourcing local communities. The project's co-founder, Tiziana von Witzleben, believes that the German government might not have the capacity to collect and share this information, and suspects that big players like Google and Amazon are being secretive about their activities due to potential protests.

Protests against data centers in Germany are generally local community phenomena, unlike the nationwide movement seen in the US. In February, the local council of Groß-Gerau in the Frankfurt region voted against a €2.5-billion ($2.8-billion) data center proposal by a US operator, partly due to concerns from residents about heat waste.

Another project in Maintal faced strong opposition due to plans for a gas-fired power plant. Despite these protests, Germany is the largest data center market in Europe, with over a third of the country's total data center capacity concentrated in the Frankfurt/Rhine-Main region. The federal government aims to double data center capacity by 2030, proposing amendments to the Energy Efficiency Act that regulate energy consumption and climate protection.

However, environmentalists question whether the targets are based on real demand, while the socialist Left Party is skeptical of the expansion.