Artificial intelligence: Playmobil factory is to become a data center

The company closed its only German production site in the summer. The company wants to realign itself with its new Playmobil digital division.

Nuremberg. Where Playmobil toys were produced until recently, a high-performance data center is now being built: Playmobil parent Horst Brandstätter Group is building a computing campus on the site of its factory in Dietenhofen, which is designed for an output of 100 megawatts and has potential beyond that, as the company announced.

Brandstätter provides the infrastructure; partners are supposed to manage the respective applications partly on their own. The offers range from simply providing the space with the appropriate network connection to the finished computing power.

The Playmobil digital division is a new, independent branch in the group of companies. The construction and operation of the campus is 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, especially 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 Playmobil brand has been under economic pressure for a long time.