Two new German locations: Google invests in data centers

The technology group will invest more than one billion euros in building two new data centers in Germany. This is intended to satisfy the growing demand for cloud services.

By 2030, Google will invest more than one billion euros in the construction of two new German data centers in Hanau in the Rhine-Main area and in the greater Berlin area. The US Internet company announced this today. The cloud system in Hanau is only 20 kilometers away from the world’s largest Internet node DE-CIX, said Philipp Justus, Google’s Central Europe boss. The four-story building with a usable area of ​​around 10,000 square meters will be fully operational in the coming year.

“Faster and more reliable”

At the same time, Google will set up a completely new Berlin-Brandenburg cloud region by 2022. The exact location of the servers was not disclosed. “We have very, very high demand from corporate customers here in the Berlin-Brandenburg region,” said Justus. “And the closer we are to these customers with a cloud region, the faster, the more reliable the services that the Google Cloud offers these companies.”

With the two cloud regions, for example, data runtimes (so-called latency) would be significantly reduced compared to a trans-Atlantic data connection. There are also legal and regulatory reasons for customers to prefer to work on cloud computers that are located in Germany instead of using systems in the USA. Customers in Germany can now choose from two German cloud regions as an alternative to a server location in the USA, said Justus.

In addition, the group will indirectly finance wind parks and solar systems in Germany via a large-scale supply contract with the Cologne energy supplier Engie in order to be able to operate the cloud with renewable energies.

Expand the cloud business

With this investment, Google intends to put its own business model, which until now mainly depended on sales from advertising and data, on a broader footing. Group boss Sundar Pichai wants to build up the cloud division as another important source of income. There is plenty of money to invest, with the bottom line being that Google made more than $ 18 billion in the second quarter of this year alone.

Pichai does not want to leave the lucrative German market to the market leaders Amazon AWS and Microsoft, who are regularly active in this segment with high growth rates and considerable returns.

The demand in Germany is growing

Because the demand for cloud services is also growing in this country: the mail order company Otto, Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank have already been won by Google as cloud customers. In order to promote the cloud business in Germany, the Internet company had already poached Daniel Holz, the Germany managing director of the software giant SAP, last October. He is now responsible for Google’s cloud business in Germany and Central Europe.

The group currently employs around 2500 people at four locations in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich.

Data centers with renewable energies

Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier (CDU) was pleased with the announcement by Google: One billion euros by 2030 would be a “strong signal”. The investments are about green energy and digital infrastructure. This shows: “Green energy has long been a key factor in choosing a location.” Data centers, not just Google’s, are power guzzlers and could contribute to global warming if they are fed with electricity from coal-fired power plants.

Google announced that the local energy partner Engie Deutschland from Cologne will feed more than 140 megawatts (MW) of solar and wind energy into the German grid in the coming years. This included a new 39 MW photovoltaic system and the maintenance of 22 wind farms.

This is to ensure that “from 2022 onwards, around 80 percent of the energy supplied to the Google infrastructure will come from CO2-free sources every hour”. “We want to use only CO2-free energy around the clock by 2030,” promised Justus.