Germany is Europe’s largest data center market by number of sites, with Frankfurt – home to one of the world’s largest internet exchanges – as its core hub, alongside growing clusters around Berlin and Munich. It is also the only country with a public national data center register, established under its Energy Efficiency Act, that contains data center capacity figures (with partial coverage).

Grid access is a growing constraint: transmission-level connection requests total 270 GW, most of it battery storage. The transmission operators now assess applications in fixed cycles against maturity criteria (the Reifegradverfahren) rather than in order of arrival, an approach being written into law through the grids package from January 2027, which also allows flexibility conditions and the reduction of capacity left unused for five years. The national Data Centre Strategy of March 2026 adds measures on faster connections, priority brownfield sites and local tax revenues, while efficiency rules require 100% renewable power from 2027 and, after a recent relaxation, a PUE of 1.3 for new facilities and waste heat reuse in most cases.