In the past ten years, computing power in Germany has almost doubled. Nevertheless, Germany as a business location continues to lose importance in an international comparison.
More and more data centers are being put into operation in Germany – but the industry cannot quite keep up with the growth in countries such as the USA and China. This is the result of a study by the Borderstep Institute commissioned by the digital association Bitkom.
But although IT computing power in Germany has almost doubled over the past ten years, Germany’s share of the global server inventory has fallen from 3.5 percent to three percent. Most servers are located in the US and China. Overall, the global server population last year was around 85.6 million units, compared to 58.8 million in 2015.
Power consumption increased significantly
With the increase in computing power, the demand for electricity also grew: in Germany it was 18 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2022. Ten years earlier, data centers consumed eleven billion kWh. However, the further development of hardware and software in particular has been able to reduce energy consumption: while IT performance has increased by 90 percent, power consumption has increased by around 63 percent.
The eco-balance of the data centers also benefited from innovations and the expansion of renewable energies: a large proportion of the data centers now use green electricity.
Technical implementation difficult
The environmental balance could be even better if the heat from server operation were used sensibly. However, this can only be technically implemented in a few exceptional cases, argued Bitkom CEO Bernhard Rohleder: “In order to be able to dissipate waste heat, you need someone who can actually remove the waste heat and wants to do so.”
In many places, the necessary fourth-generation district heating networks were missing. The exhaust air from the data centers is not hot enough for conventional district heating networks to be used.