Artificial Intelligence: Germany plans to double the capacity of data centers and faces opposition

The digital future has arrived, and it is taking shape in the German town of Dietzenbach. Google, EdgeConnex, and MainCubes, two American companies and a third German company, have reserved a site to establish a data center in this small town near Frankfurt am Main.

Ditzenbach, with a population of 35,000 people, is a logistics center close to Frankfurt Airport.

The Frankfurt region, the center of Germany's financial sector, is one of the most attractive locations for digital cloud operators around the world. As the global demand for computing capabilities grows, more centers are being planned in the region.

Residents' concerns about high consumption of electricity and water

In Ditzenbach, the announcement of plans for a fourth giant data center was met with resistance from local residents. Thousands of computers stacked inside one of these data centers require large supplies of power to operate around the clock. They also release large amounts of heat and need to be cooled, which requires huge amounts of water.

The residents of Ditzenbach who were interviewed by DW expressed their concern about the high water and electricity bills, and the high temperatures in their town.

“We want to know two things: What is the benefit to the local community here in Ditzenbach? “What are the environmental impacts?” asks Ditzenbach resident Wilhelm Sauer, pointing to the four huge chimneys rising from the EdgeConnix data centre.

Local activists believe that the burden that data centers will impose on regional resources may not be compensated by the limited number of new jobs announced.

On the other hand, the mayor of Ditzenbach, Dieter Lange, who belongs to the center-left Social Democratic Party, is optimistic. He expected the Google data center to bring about 100 “high-value jobs” to his town.

He also expects the project to benefit his city's treasury, telling DW: "We expect a large tax contribution."

But Tara Merk, a researcher in the field of community data centers at the Weitzenbaum Institute, doubts that the tax return will be meaningful, as she believes that Germany can likely expect only small revenues from data centers run by American companies, “because the profits may be taxed elsewhere.” "Especially when we think about big technology companies, they will not pay their taxes in Ditzenbach," she told DW.

Data centers and the absence of information

In August 2026, the German government launched a data center registry. The register includes data on energy and water consumption and energy efficiency measures of the centers in operation.

But the registry only includes about 300 data centres, a far smaller number than the nearly 2,000 centers the government says are operating across the country.

"Some companies report their small projects, but not the big ones," Werner Neumann, a board member of the environmental organization Bond, told DW.

There are no official statistics on the number of data centers under construction or their locations in Germany. So the Heise Loft (Hot Air) project, a civil society initiative, decided to fill this information gap, developing an online map of planned data centers across Germany. The map is updated daily based on information collected by local residents.

"Theoretically, we should have access to this information," Titsiana von Wetzleben, co-founder of the Heise Loft initiative, told DW. "Maybe the German government doesn't have the capacity [to collect this information] and publish it. But I think it's deliberate, especially [by] the 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 face massive protests."

Unlike the United States, where a nationwide movement has mobilized protests across the country, protests against data centers in Germany remain a local phenomenon.

In February, the local council of the city of Gross-Gerau in the Frankfurt region voted against a €2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) data center project proposed by a US operator. The vote was due - at least in part - to widespread protests from residents concerned about waste heat, according to what the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported.

In the town of Maintal, located in the same region, a giant data center belonging to Edge Connex faced strong protests over its plans to build its own gas-fired power plant. The €1 billion project is currently looking for energy alternatives in a region whose electrical grid is already approaching its limits.

The race for computing power

Germany is the largest data center market in Europe, both in terms of capacity and number of locations. The Frankfurt/Rhine-Main region, which includes Dietzenbach, accounts for more than a third of the country's total data center capacity.

The region's proximity to the Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) in Frankfurt makes it an attractive destination for digital cloud operators.

To achieve its strategic goal of doubling the capacity of data centers by 2030, the federal government, composed of the coalition of the center-right Christian Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party, proposed to amend the Energy Efficiency Act (EnEfG) that regulates energy consumption and climate protection.

On the opposition side, the environmentalist Green Party doubts that Germany needs an expansion of this size. While the Left Party adopts an opposing position on the entire expansion. Both parties oppose the government's plans to relax energy efficiency laws in order to attract more data centres.

The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party supports the expansion of data centers, but criticizes the law that encourages the use of renewable energy to operate them.

Why are amendments to the energy efficiency law controversial?

The proposed amendment would postpone the deadline for operators to meet renewable energy goals and relax requirements for reusing waste heat.

Despite this plan, Tara Merk still considers Germany's efforts towards energy-efficient data centers a progressive model on the global level.

But she criticizes provisions of the law that would give companies the right to consider data on their water and electricity consumption as trade secrets.

"This proposed amendment tilts the regulatory landscape heavily in favor of operators," she told DW. "Good data is essential for regulation, intervention, and building trust and acceptance among local communities."

“I think [the lack of transparency] will ultimately deepen the animosity between data centers and local communities, which will make it difficult for operators to scale,” Merck warned.

For its part, Algorithm Watch, an organization concerned with monitoring artificial intelligence, said in a public statement that the legal amendments proposed by the government do not aim to reduce bureaucracy, but rather to appease American technology giants Microsoft, Google, and Vantage.

"German and European operators mostly have no problem with the current rules. The amendments run counter to the government's own goal of promoting German/European companies," the organization said.

Last summer, the organization launched a campaign in which it collected 150,000 signatures against amendments to the law, demanding that data centers maintain their obligations to publicly disclose their operational data.