Data centers for all?

Chancellor Merz has invited business leaders to an investment summit and is promising them everything under the sun to encourage them to invest in Germany. Yet many among them would gladly take our country, our water, and our electricity — but when it comes to creating new jobs, the outlook is bleak.

In particular, the establishment of new data centers should be closely scrutinized, as they can be operated with very few employees, and their usefulness can be called into question after the 200th spam email and the umpteenth household tip from a so-called AI. At the same time, these data centers consume our electricity and our water.

Actually, the EU is planning regulations for data centers designed to minimize electricity and water consumption as well as waste heat as much as possible. But the German federal government wants to water down these energy efficiency standards, thereby yielding to the interests of the big tech giants, according to Netzpolitik.org.

According to the government’s data center strategy, IT capacity in Germany is expected to rise from the current level of about two gigawatts to more than four gigawatts by 2030. That’s bad enough, but a report commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs predicts that data center electricity consumption will grow to about 80 terawatt-hours by 2045. That would be roughly four times the amount of electricity used today.

Although a data center registry has been in place since this past summer under the Energy Efficiency Act (EnEfG), only 319 of the estimated 1,000 data centers required to report have submitted their data so far. And from the limited data available, it can already be deduced that only one-third of the companies meet the required power usage effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.5.

In fact, at the EU level, it is planned that in the future only data centers with a PUE below 1.2 will be built, and that new data centers starting in July 2028 will have a waste heat utilization rate of 20%. The key priority now is to ensure that these requirements remain in place at the EU level and are not undermined by unilateral national actions — and that compliance with them is regularly monitored.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Read more https://netzpolitik.org/2026/ki-boom-wie-die-bundesregierung-die-regulierung-von-rechenzentren-aushoehlt/

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