Frankfurt (Oder) creates conditions for new data centre location

The planned site is located in the future industrial and business park on the B87 motorway in the Markendorf district of Frankfurt. The site is one of the few large areas available in Germany that are suitable for scalable data centre clusters of this size and is to be developed in several construction phases. A total of six modules with a planned total connected load of up to 350 megawatts are planned. A connection to the 380 kV extra-high voltage grid of the transmission system operator 50Hertz is planned for this. The total investment is estimated to be up to 3.5 billion euros when fully expanded.

Data centres are considered a key technology for data-intensive applications such as cloud services, artificial intelligence and industrial digitalisation. At the same time, they act as anchor investments that enable the establishment of further companies along the digital value chain.

"The unanimous decision of the Frankfurt City Council is a strong signal for investors and partners. Our goal is to develop a scalable and energy-efficient data centre cluster together with the city of Frankfurt (Oder) that combines technological innovation and sustainable location development. I would like to express my sincere thanks for the excellent cooperation," says Andreas Klemund, Managing Director of Frankfurt Data FFO AI GmbH.

Frankfurt's Lord Mayor Dr Axel Strasser sees the clear vote as a strong signal that the city and its councillors are open to innovative projects: "We want to provide impetus through new companies. The project has economic policy significance for the entire region. I would like to thank everyone involved, the administration, the Investor Centre Ostbrandenburg (ICOB) and the city councillors for their successful cooperation. We have shown that we can keep pace with the agility and dynamism of the project developer. 

"With the decision of the city councillors, an important milestone has now been reached," continued the Lord Mayor. "We all realise that there are still many steps ahead of us, but we want and need to bring this project to a successful conclusion together. Because Frankfurt (Oder) would benefit from this accounting centre in many ways: This settlement gives us the opportunity for the grid operators to finally connect Frankfurt (Oder) to a sustainable energy supply. Only then will it be possible to attract further industry to the area. There are also plans to feed the waste heat from the data centre into our district heating network, which will provide us with a climate-friendly and cost-effective heat supply. The data centre could create 200 to 300 new jobs, and business tax revenue could also be expected.

Frankfurt Data FFO AI GmbH and its relocation project have been intensively supported by ICOB, the city's business development agency, in recent months. For Christopher Nüßlein, Managing Director at ICOB, the mutual reliability of the cooperation was crucial in order to meet the tight deadlines: "Companies need clear statements in order to be able to make their location decisions. At the same time, we are dependent on comprehensive information from the company in order to be able to make these statements at all. This interplay of give and take has worked very well and resulted in a trusting collaboration."

The further development of the Frankfurt data centre campus will take place step by step. In the coming months, the focus will be on securing planning permission and further concretising the technical infrastructure.

"I am particularly pleased about this investment in our city. Urban development without computing power is no longer expedient today," said Dr André Benedict Prusa, Head of the Building Department of the City of Frankfurt (Oder).

The planned project fits in with the German government's recently adopted National Data Centre Strategy, which provides for a significant expansion of capacities for cloud and AI applications and further intensifies competition for suitable locations in Germany. Data centre capacities in Germany are to be at least doubled by 2030, while capacities for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing are to be quadrupled. The strategy comprises 28 measures that are to be launched and completed as far as possible within the next 12 months. In this context, it is also planned to introduce a special apportionment standard for the trade tax base for data centres in order to allow local municipalities to participate more strongly and evenly in the trade tax revenue from the exclusive operation of data centres.