The long-anticipated announcement came on November 11, when Google revealed details at a press conference in Berlin.
Philipp Justus, the California-based tech giant’s managing director for Germany, said the company would invest €5.5 billion ($6.37 billion) over the next four years. That includes the construction of a new data center in near Frankfurt and expansions at existing sites in Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin.
Google and other Big Tech companies need data centers across the world to handle the computing power needed for AI applicationsImage: Google Handout/dpa/picture-alliance
German officials hailed the announcement as a boost for the country’s digital ambitions.
“We want to make Germany a leading location for data centers in Europe,” the German minister responsible for digitization, Karsten Wildberger, told the news agency Reuters.
Research Minister Dorothee Bär called Google’s move proof that “Germany is already an attractive location.” The investment, she said, would bring “growth and added value for our country.”
Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil also praised the plans, describing them as “exactly what we need right now.”
Speaking to German news agency dpa, he called the initiative “a genuine investment in the future — in innovation, artificial intelligence , climate-neutral transformation and future jobs in Germany.”
German Finance Minister Klingbeil (right) praised Google’s plans, describing them as “exactly what we need right now.”Image: Lisi Niesner/REUTERS
Google said its investments would “secure around 9,000 jobs in Germany annually until 2029.”
Experts urge caution
While many celebrated the announcement, some experts warned against overlooking the potential downsides.
Katharina Hölzle, director at the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, told DW that she welcomed the investment “because it shows that we’re more attractive than we think.”
But she also expressed concern that “new dependencies could arise,” warning that “we’re building additional infrastructures here that will make it even harder for us to disengage later on.”
Wolfgang Eppler, a researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) in Karlsruhe, Germany, called the investment “a lot of money” but added that it pales in comparison to US spending levels.
“When you look at what the US is investing — for example, $500 billion — it’s really just a drop in the ocean,” he said.
The scale of Google’s investment underscores the growing gap between Europe and the US, where tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and startups like OpenAI are pouring hundreds of billions into expanding AI computing capacity.
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According to Bloomberg, Google’s German project is expected to use up to 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), a fraction of the 500,000 GPUs planned for a single data center project in Texas backed by SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle.
Broader industry momentum
Google is not alone in betting on Germany’s data economy. Just last week, German telecoms operator Deutsche Telekom and American AI chipmaker Nvidia announced a joint €1 billion data center project.
According to the industry association Bitkom, total data center investment in Germany will reach about €12 billion this year.
In September, French firm Data4 announced plans to invest around €2 billion and laid the cornerstone for its first German facility in Hanau.
Meanwhile, Innovation Park for Artificial Intelligence (IPAI) in Heilbronn, a city just north of Stuttgart, is set to become Europe’s largest AI ecosystem, with a focus on chip design.
The surge in AI-driven demand for computing power has triggered a boom in data center construction. A recent Bitkom study found that Germany’s total server capacity is expected to nearly double to 5 gigawatts by 2030.
A European push
The European Union is also trying to close the technology gap. In February, it unveiled a €200 billion plan to promote AI development and triple the region’s capacity for such systems by 2032.
Deutsche Telekom is reportedly in talks with several companies about building so-called AI gigafactories, though progress has been slow and the EU has yet to detail how it will vet projects or allocate funding.
Google says its new German facilities will be built with sustainability in mind. The company plans to capture and reuse waste heat from its data center near Frankfurt by feeding it into the district-heating network of regional utility EVO. Once operational, the system could supply more than 2,000 nearby households with hot water and heating.
Google’s data center in Eemshaven, Netherlands, is currently being rebuilt to run entirely on renewable energyImage: Jochen Tack/picture alliance
A fully climate-neutral data center remains a challenge, says Fraunhofer’s Hölzle, who remains cautiously optimistic.
“I don’t know if we’ll reach complete zero [emissions],” she said. “But we should think about how, if we’re not building our own data centers, we can at least develop the technologies that will be used in them — I definitely see opportunities for us there.”
Europe’s digital sovereignty at stake?
Both experts interviewed by DW urged policymakers to remain vigilant.
“We shouldn’t make ourselves too dependent,” warned Eppler, the ITAS researcher, noting that a US company will be storing and processing German data.
Hölzle said she takes some comfort in the fact that “the discussion about digital sovereignty has increased over the past twelve months.”
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Still, she added that it was “absolutely crucial” that German policymakers “pay close attention” to where these data are stored and who has access to them.
“That’s a fundamental issue for protecting the competitiveness of German industry,” she said.
This article was originally written in German.
