If you are reading this text on your phone, it has just left a data centre. Very probably one in Frankfurt, possibly one in Virginia or Dublin. Every email, every WhatsApp message, every bank transfer, every route planned in the car, every ChatGPT answer passes through a building like this. Without data centres, the digital world does not work. We just don’t notice them, because they are usually far away.
What is actually inside?
Imagine a hall roughly the size of a supermarket, but taller. Set up in rows: cabinet-sized computers with blinking lights. Several thousand of them in total. They are connected to one another, run around the clock and process requests. What a sawmill is for wood, a data centre is for data: an industrial plant that processes information.
Three things set a modern data centre apart from an ordinary industrial building: a very powerful grid connection, sophisticated cooling (otherwise the servers overheat within hours) and very fast data lines to the internet. Whoever has all of this can build a data centre. Whoever does not, cannot.
The tenants are the big cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and increasingly also German corporations such as SAP, Telekom or banks that no longer want to run their IT themselves. Contracts run for 15 to 20 years. This is not an industry that will be gone again next year.
Why are data centres so urgent now?
Data centres have existed since the 1960s. What is new is not their existence but the speed at which demand for them is growing. Three developments are coming together, and none of them can be sat out.
- 1Artificial intelligence.
A single request to ChatGPT needs roughly ten times as much electricity as a Google search. AI in hospitals, in industry, in public administration and in the car is becoming a matter of course, and every one of these applications runs on servers that have to be located somewhere.
- 2Volume of data.
The worldwide volume of data doubles roughly every two years. More sensors in machines, more video content, more connected devices, more digital administration. What was enough for a big city in 2015 barely covers the needs of a medium-sized town today.
- 3Sovereignty.
If German hospital data is stored on servers in Texas, Germany has no physical access to it in the event of a conflict. What often does not matter in the private sphere becomes a security issue for public authorities, critical infrastructure, industry and research.
Where Germany stands and where it needs to go
Today Germany is the largest data centre location in Europe. That sounds good. On an international scale, it is sobering:
If the planned doubling by 2030 does not succeed, the consequence is not abstract: German hospitals, medium-sized companies and universities will have to run their AI applications on US servers. What we are experiencing today with natural gas and oil, dependence on a distant supplier who dictates the terms, threatens to repeat itself digitally. The Federal Government has stated this clearly:
Computing power is the new raw material. And data centres are the new refineries.- Dr. Karsten Wildberger, Federal Minister for Digital Affairs · Bundestag, 16 April 2026
What does this mean for Philippsburg?
The question “do we need more data centres in Germany” has been answered: yes, we do. The second question is: where? Sites where a powerful grid connection, sufficient space and good network connectivity come together are rare in Germany. Philippsburg is one of them: the infrastructure that carried the nuclear power plant for four decades can be used for the next generation.
You can read what exactly happens to the waste heat and how the project fits into the history of the site in our other background papers.