BERLIN: The German government plans to massively expand data centre capacity to ensure that Europe's biggest economy does not fall behind in the global race for technological sovereignty, according to a strategy paper.
Data centre performance is to be at least doubled by 2030 compared to 2025 levels, while capacities for artificial intelligence (AI) are to be increased at least fourfold, according to the policy paper by the Ministry for Digital Ministry which is set to be adopted by Cabinet on Wednesday.
A surge in data-intensive AI applications, cloud services and digitalisation is fuelling a rapidly growing global demand for processing power.
The ministry has compiled a package of 28 measures to establish Germany as a leading, sovereign data hub in Europe.
Under the plans, power stations of decommissioned lignite mines are to be converted into data centres as they are already connected to the grid.
In order to increase acceptance among local residents, business taxes for a data centre are to be paid to the municipality where the centre is located, rather than at the location of the headquarters of the company running the facility.
Data centres are to run on 100% renewable energy in the future, while the government intends to campaign at the EU level to ensure that the excess heat emitted by the facilities can be passed on for free to local heating networks without taxes.
The policy paper also aims to reduce dependencies on non-European massive-scale cloud service providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure by prioritising German and European companies when it comes to creating new processing capacity.
The plan includes the establishment of at least one commercial "AI gigafactory" in Germany, to be realised by a public-private consortium under European leadership. – dpa
