Market
Germany's data centre strategy, read closely
In March 2026 the federal government set out what it wants from data centres in Germany. It is worth reading as a specification rather than as politics: each priority in it is something a site either has or does not, and most of them are decided by the ground long before anyone writes software.
The state has said what it wants from data centres. Set against each priority, what a site can actually offer – and what it cannot.
Read it as a shopping list
Policy documents are usually read for their tone. This one is more useful read for its constraints. Strip the language and what remains is a short list of properties the state would like new capacity to have: it should be efficient, its waste heat should be used, it should sit where the grid can carry it, it should be operable under German and European law, and it should not depend on a single foreign supplier for the layer beneath the model.
Priority against answer
Efficiency is answered by the building: cooling that reaches the chip, and a design PUE stated as a design figure. Waste heat is answered by proximity, not by intent – a network within pumping distance, or nothing. Grid is answered by the connection application and its date, not by ambition. Jurisdiction is answered by where the company is registered and where the machines physically stand. Only the last of those can be arranged late; the rest are properties of the site.
What a site cannot answer
No amount of engineering makes a building matter to a strategy about sovereignty of models rather than of infrastructure. We build the layers beneath: power, cooling, heat, connectivity, security, control. What gets trained in the halls is the tenant's question, and a site claiming otherwise is claiming something it does not control.
The honest reading
A strategy is not a subsidy and does not become one by being cited. What it does is tell an operator which arguments will be heard. Ours are that the ground is measured, the connection is applied for with a date, the heat has a named offtaker within reach, and every figure on this site says what kind of figure it is.
Sources
- 01⚠️ Federal data centre strategy, March 2026 – cite the document itself before quoting any figure from it. This article describes the shape of the obligations, not its wording.
- 02Energieeffizienzgesetz (EnEfG), full text – Bundesministerium der Justiz
