The Granite AI Valley
Granite AI Valley
STAND 08/2026
Where geology, water, energy and intelligence become infrastructure.
AI is digital. Its infrastructure is not.
Blankenburg · Harz · Germany. A European model for sovereign AI infrastructure — compute, energy, water, heat recovery and a reserved zone for future quantum infrastructure, engineered as one physical system on ground that does not move.
AI needs power. It needs cooling. It needs land, data, jurisdiction and resilience. The models change every few months; the physical layer beneath them takes years to build and decades to matter. Black Vault builds that layer.
Why Blankenburg.
~400 million years of geological history.
Ancient foundations beneath a next-generation campus — stable, quiet ground.
A local water resource.
Mine water at 10–12 °C cools a closed campus loop across a heat exchanger, designed to avoid potable water.
Power meets compute.
Designed around resilient, scalable power — grid, on-site generation and storage.
Infrastructure time horizons.
Dispatch duration, at the design case.
A data centre draws the same power at three in the morning as at noon. The question is not how much a source can produce, but for how long it can hold the load.
Load support by source
From geology to intelligence.
The Black Vault model is not a data centre surrounded by infrastructure. The infrastructure is the product.
Water is part of the economics.
Black Vault treats water not as a consumable but as part of an integrated thermal system: source, closed-loop cooling, compute, heat recovery, regional use. The objective is to capture and reuse thermal energy rather than reject it into the atmosphere.
Every data centre creates heat. We plan to put it to work.
A sovereign AI campus should not operate as an isolated industrial consumer. Its thermal output can become part of the regional energy system — recovered from the machines and offered to the town's network.
- AI compute
- Heat recovery
- District heating / industry
- Local value
From granite to quantum.
Some of the oldest ground in Germany can become the foundation for some of the newest computing. The campus is designed across three horizons of compute:
High-density accelerated computing.
High-performance computing.
A reserved zone on structurally isolated ground. Vibration and EMI studies pending before any of it is a specification.
Why we call it the Granite AI Valley.
Silicon Valley became a name because a place became an ecosystem — a material, an institution, and the conditions around them. Black Vault proposes a European model built on a different set of conditions: geology, energy, water, compute, quantum, research and regional industry, converging in one place.
A European infrastructure ecosystem, built on conditions Silicon Valley never had.
From one campus to a European network.
Blankenburg is the origin, not the whole plan. Black Vault is designed as a network of sovereign AI infrastructure — from large campuses to distributed compute nodes.
Large campuses
AI / HPC · energy, at campus scale. Blankenburg is the first anchor.
BlackKub
Distributed AI infrastructure in existing buildings — the Quedlinburg energy node is the first.
Digital platform
Site discovery · capacity · infrastructure intelligence.
Who controls the infrastructure controls the future of AI.
Sovereignty is not a slogan here; it is a set of questions the architecture answers in one place.
110 kV grid connection (application filed 03/2026) · 30 MW on-site generation · single operator
Tenant-owned accelerators · operator-owned power, cooling and shell
Customer-configured German/EU residency · German project entity · EU regulatory framework
Closed campus and rack loops · source water abstracted and returned · designed to avoid potable water
Recovered on site · transfer point to the municipal network
German project entity · German site · EU regulatory framework
Infrastructure should create value where it is built.
For the region
Energy infrastructure · Heat recovery · Jobs · Local suppliers
For Europe
Sovereign compute · Data jurisdiction · Resilience
For customers
AI compute · HPC · Quantum (future) · Secure infrastructure
From brownfield to AI future.
Industrial ground built for the energy economy can become the foundation of Europe's AI economy. The cheapest hectare, environmentally, is one that was already industrial — converted rather than demolished.
The 2032 vision.
2026
Site · corporate structure · engineering · partnerships.
2027
First development phase.
2028–30
AI infrastructure expansion.
2032
Up to 100 MW — long-term campus vision.6
Subject to grid availability, permitting, financing and phased development.
Built in Germany. Designed for Europe.
Blankenburg is the first large anchor. Black Vault is expanding its European development pipeline; new locations are announced when a project reaches the company's public disclosure threshold.
See the Granite AI Valley in development.
Visit the site. Request a site briefing. Blankenburg, Harz.
Masterplan · Site · Water · Energy · AI infrastructure · Vision 2032
Notes
- 1Geological history of the Harz region, not a dated age for the rock beneath this parcel.
- 2Mine water temperature and flow: official data, Landesverwaltungsamt Sachsen-Anhalt.
- 3Design basis. Grid connection at 110 kV is an application filed 03/2026, not a granted capacity.
- 4German building law, German and EU law over the whole system.
- 5Concept. Vibration, EMI and acoustic studies pending; what exists is a reserved zone and a foundation strategy.
- 6Vision. Subject to grid availability, permitting, financing and phased development. Not secured capacity.
- 7Terrain from the one-metre digital elevation model, © GeoBasis-DE / LVermGeo ST 2026, clipped to the site parcels. Vertical exaggeration as printed.
- 8Design basis. The figure combines roughly 25 MWth of cogeneration with roughly 10 MWth recovered from the compute load; it is not waste heat from the data centre alone.
- 9Engineering lineage of the Harz, not a connection. The UNESCO Oberharzer Wasserregal is a separate system in the Oberharz and is not physically linked to this site.
- 10Industry observation on model release cadence, not a Black Vault figure. Shown to give the scale of the shortest horizon.
