AI: Concern as Germany plans to double data center capacity

The digital future is here, and it is unfolding in the town of Dietzenbach.  

Google, EdgeConnex, and Maincubes, two US tech companies and one German, have each reserved a spotfor a data center in the small town near Frankfurt am Main.  

Dietzenbach is a logistics hub near Frankfurt's airport, and home to 35,000 people.   

The Frankfurt region, the center of Germany's financial industry, is one of the most attractive locations for digital cloud operators worldwide, and as demand for computing capacity continues to grow, more centers are planned for the region. 

Locals worry about electricity and water usage

However, the news of plans for a fourth mega data center has been met with resistance by locals. The stacks of tens of thousands of computers in a data center need a high supply of energy to run around the clock. They radiate large amounts of heat and need cooling, which requires huge quantities of water. 

The people of Dietzenbach DW met were worried about their water and electricity bills rising, as well as a higher temperature in their town.   

"We want to know two things: What are the benefits for the local community here in Dietzenbach? And what are the environmental impacts?" said Dietzenbach resident Wilhelm Sauer, pointing at the four imposing chimneys rising from the EdgeConnex data center. 

He and the other local activists believe that the toll the data centers will take on regional resources may not be offset by the limited number of new jobs announced. 

Dietzenbach's mayor, Dieter Lang of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), however, is optimistic. He predicted that around 100 "high-value jobs" would come to his town through the Google data center. 

He also expects it will benefit his city's coffers: "We expect a substantial tax contribution," Lang told DW.  

But Tara Merk, researcher on Community Data Centers at the Weizenbaum Institute, is skeptical: She believes Germany can probably expect little revenue from data centers operated by US companies, "because the profits may be taxed elsewhere."  

"Especially thinking about big tech companies — they're not going to be doing their taxes in Dietzenbach," she told DW. 

Where will the next AI data centers go?

Data centers and lack of information    

In August 2026, the German government launched a data centers registry listing energy consumption, water consumption, and energy efficiency measures for the data centers that are already operating.  

But the list includes only around 300 data centers, far fewer than the estimated 2,000 data centers the government says are running across the country.  

"Some companies report their smaller projects but not the big ones," Werner Neumann, board member of the environmental group BUND, told DW.  

There is no official overview of how many data centers are being built or where. The civil society project Heisse Luft (Hot Air) has decided to fill these information gap, and has developed an online map of the planned data centers across Germany. The map is updated every day with information based on crowdsourcing from local communities.  

"Theoretically, we should have access to this information," Tiziana von Witzleben, co-founder of the Heisse Luft initiative, told DW. "Maybe the German government doesn't have the capacity to [collect this information] and share it. But I believe it is on purpose, particularly [on the part of] big players like Google and Amazon. [They] are known to be very secretive about what they do. Because they know that if they tell people, they will get a lot of protest."

Unlike in the US, where a nationwide movement mobilized protests all over the country, protests against data centers in Germany remain a local community phenomenon.  

In February, the local council of Groß-Gerau in the Frankfurt region voted against a €2.5-billion ($2.8 billion) data center proposed by a US operator, at least partly as a result of massive protests from the residents wary of heat waste, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.  

In Maintal, another town in the region, an EdgeConnex mega data center faced intense protest against its plans to build its own gas-fired power plant. The €1-billion project is now searching for power alternatives in a region which is already hitting its grid limits. 

The race for computational power 

Germany is the largest data center market in Europe, both by capacity and number of sites, and the Frankfurt/Rhine-Main region, which includes Dietzenbach, holds over a third of the country's total data center capacity.  

Its proximity to the Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) infrastructure in Frankfurt makes the region attractive for digital cloud operators.  

To achieve its strategic goal of doubling data center capacity by 2030, the federal government, a coalition of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the SPD, has proposed amending the Energy Efficiency Act (EnEfG) that regulates energy consumption and climate protection.  

The environmentalist Green Party questions whether the targets are based on real demand. The socialist Left Party, on the other hand, is skeptical of the expansion as a whole. Both parties oppose the government's plans to relax the rules to attract more data centers.  

On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) supports the expansion of data centers but criticizes the law promoting the use of renewable energy to power them.  

Europe's quest for digital independence

Why are energy efficiency amendments controversial? 

The proposed amendment would push back the deadline for operators to achieve renewable energy targets, and would relax requirements for the reuse of heat waste.   

Despite this plan, Tara Merk still considers the push for energy-efficient data centers in Germany to be a progressive example in the global context.  

But she is critical of the parts of the law that would give companies the right to declare that the data on the amount of water and electricity they use are trade secrets. 

"This proposed amendment shifts the regulatory landscape very much in favor of operators," she told DW. "Having good data is needed to regulate, intervene, and build trust and acceptance within local communities."

"I think [lack of transparency] is ultimately going to foster more antagonism between data centers and local communities, making it harder for operators to expand or even keep their existing sites running the way they are," Merk warned.  

Algorithm Watch, an AI watchdog, argued in a public statement that the legal changes the government is proposing are not about cutting bureaucracy, but more about appeasing US tech giants Microsoft, Google, and Vantage.   

"German and European operators mostly have no problem with the current rules," Algorithm Watch said. "The amendments run counter to the government's own aim of strengthening German/European firms,"

This summer, the watchdog launched a campaign and collected 150,000 signatures against the amendments to the law, calling for the public reporting obligations of data centers to be retained.  

The amendments were presented to the Bundestag in September. If the new law passes, the government hopes it will take effect in January.