Dietenhofen: Closed Playmobil factory is to become a data center

Brandstätter provides the infrastructure; partners are supposed to manage the respective applications partly on their own. The Playmobil digital division is a new, independent branch in the group of companies, according to the statement. The construction and operation of the campus should therefore be carried out by a team with more than 25 years of experience in the areas of data centers and IT.

The location in Dietenhofen offers good conditions for a data center. There is already a connection to a 110 kilovolt line on the Playmobil site. The network operator N-ERGIE in Nuremberg has guaranteed the corresponding network capacities. “Where Playmobil has been produced for decades, we want to enable one of the most important infrastructures of the digital future,” said Brandstätter board member Matthias Fauser. Large computing power will become more and more important in the future, primarily for artificial intelligence applications.

Until the summer, the site in Dietenhofen was the only German factory where Playmobil had produced toys. It closed at the end of June and production was moved abroad. 350 employees lost their jobs.

The Horst Brandstätter Group has been through difficult times in recent years. The relevance of Playmobil toys in children's rooms has decreased. In just a few years, the group lost a third of its sales.