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Holger: So, Hattersheim is a small town, very close to Frankfurt in Germany. I think something about 30,000 people living here. It has grown over the last 15 years massively. And we are in the most condensed area of the whole of Germany.
Charli: Holger Sachs is an IT guy. And a family man. He works for an investment company and is father to two kids and a little old dog. He lives in Hattersheim. That’s the small town he’s describing, about 9 miles west of Frankfurt in central Germany. And as far as small towns go, Holger says, Hattersheim is a perfectly good place to live. But... it’s not exactly pretty.
Holger: Our city is not really well known for being beautiful. It's like, okay, if you cannot find anything else, then go here, but it's not really nice.
Charli: But there is one pretty patch. On the edge of the town, bordered on one side by a leafy cemetery, and on another by the main road into town.
Holger: And it's like a very nice location.
A wide expanse of wild, grassy vegetation. About 18 acres in size.
Holger: It looks very nice... trees and gardens and all of this.
It’s a scrap of nature in a built-up, busy area. In spring, it burns such a brilliant, luminous yellow with the blossoming of the rapeseed you can see it from miles away.
Holger: And this was a really nice, let's say, entrance point to our city. And even people visiting me said, oh, I was not aware that it looks so nice in your area. This is really beautiful.
Charli: Local residents like Holger were proud of this patch. Not only that... it was specially reserved for agriculture, for green space, and to preserve special climate and groundwater functions. Strictly for nature. No business but that of the bees allowed.
But not long ago, that changed.
Holger: And um, and then... it all started somehow.
Charli: The area, the local council voted, would be re-zoned. From natural to industrial.
Holger: And now... they're really destroying this beautiful area.
Charli: The long grasses are gone, so too the wildflowers and the trees that once shaded the northern flank. Now, in place of this scrap of nature, behind tall, mesh-covered construction fences, thunders a roaring mess of trucks, machines and men. Digging, drilling, dirt moving.
They’re busy making way for something big. Something suddenly in enormous demand.
And so Hattersheim, this small and otherwise unremarkable German town, has found itself on the frontline of a global race.
Holger: That's where I said, no. I need to do something against it.
Series jingle
Jensen Huang: This is the beginning of a new industrial revolution. And this industrial revolution is about the production – not of energy, not of food – but the production of intelligence.
Alex Karp: We're in an arms race here... We're running. We're running like hell.
Sam Altman: Um, it does feel like it's going very fast.
Ursula von der Leyen: We will spare no effort to make Europe an AI continent... This is the great mission of our time.
This is the future, we're told. Of economic growth. Of innovation. And we'd better not get left behind.
But this intelligent digital universe we’re building doesn’t live in the clouds. It’s planted firmly on the ground. In data centers.
I'm Charli Shield. And in this two-part series from Living Planet, we're digging into the data center boom on the ground from Europe's biggest data center hub – Germany. This is part two. If you haven't heard part one yet, I do recommend going back and giving it a listen – you can find it in our podcast feed.
This is episode one.
Charli: Hi Svenja!
Svenja: Hi! Nice to meet you in person.
Charli: I’ve come to this small town, Hattersheim in central Germany , to meet another resident here. She and Holger have been working together to fight the re-zoning, and she agreed to show me around today. Her name is Svenja. Svenja Stöbbe.
Charli: Shoes off?
Svenja: Should we just go straight to the construction site?
Charli: Sure.
When you exit Svenja’s little white block of flats, you can turn right towards the town center, or left, towards the very edge of Hattersheim, where that green patch once sat. It’s about 150m down the road. Since builders began work there in January 2026, Svenja’s been avoiding turning left. Not today though.
Svenja: It’s the first time for me that I'm walking here during the construction because it breaks my heart. I can't recognize the area anymore actually. So if I'm gonna cry...
As we get closer, the rumble of trucks and machinery gets louder. Peeking over the steel fence barricades, it looks like any ordinary industrial construction site. There are piles of dirt, rocks, a large demountable container. There’s not much to see yet – workers have a long way to go. Here, eventually, will stand a data center campus.
Svenja: And all those residents here, they will look on the data center.
The company building it is NTT Data, a Japanese multinational IT firm. It actually already owns and operates another data center campus a few miles away in town.
We reach a different vantage point, on the other side of the site. It’s from here that I can see how large the site really is.
Charli: ...and so now you can wow yeah okay so we're standing in front of a roundabout and in the distance we can see the construction site in its full glory I would say. So yeah it's quite enormous...
They’re planning to build five centers here. At 25 metres high each, up to 110 metres long and 46 metres deep, this campus will be a sizeable addition to the town’s existing fleet of seven data centers.
The town’s mayor, Klaus Schindling, who’s member of the conservative Christian Democrats party and also sits on the board of the German Data Center Association himself, said this is all part of a plan. One to make Hattersheim a ‘smart digital city’.
Hattersheim sits smack bang in the middle of a data center hotspot in Germany. There are currently over 2000 data centers nationwide, with many more in the pipeline. About a quarter of them are located in and around Frankfurt. Mostly because, in addition to having a bunch of big banks and a giant international airport, Frankfurt is home to a big fat internet node.
Indra: The D-CIX it's called. And this is kind of a special internet knot. And if you are at 20 kilometers range to this internet knot, then you have a transmission with zero loss. So you have kind of almost in real time transmission of data. It's super, super fast.
Super, super-fast internet. That’s Indra Jungblut. She’s a tech and sustainability journalist based in Berlin.
And she’s been tracking Germany’s data center boom with a close eye.
Indra: And then I think what is also, it's called the data gravity, which means that if you build a data center, most companies don't have just one data center at one place, but they have like two, three, four, to also be able- to transfer data easily and this is what's happening in Frankfurt.
Indra has spent the last 15 years on the tech beat, watching tech trends come and go – things that felt paradigm-shifting at the time, but were eventually eclipsed by the next big thing.
Indra: I remember, for example, on this blockchain trend, for example, where everyone started to do something with blockchain because blockchain seemed to be like this great revolutionary technology. But no one really talks about it now...
But what's happening right now feels... different. Not because of a lack of hype exactly, but because of the sheer scale and speed of the physical infrastructure being built. Because of ‘the race’.
Indra: In Frankfurt, they have like data centers can be built only in industrial areas. Like every little tiny bit of space that there is, is already owned by data centers. If you want to have a piece of land in an industrial area, there's no chance. And they can pay prices no one else can pay.
Germany might have the most data centers in Europe, but it’s still far fewer than the world’s leading data center hub: the United States – which houses almost half the world total: nearly 5000 data centers and counting. That’s thanks in no small part to the big tech companies that are based there – the Googles, Amazons, Microsofts and Metas of the world.
The world’s data center fleet has been growing fast for the past couple of decades, as cloud computing, streaming services and smartphone usage have all ballooned. But in the last several years, since about late 2022, the buildout has struck a manic pace.
Data centers are often described as the ‘backbone’ of our digital lives.
All those photos we take and save in the cloud, the steps we track, the websites we surf, the questions we fire off, the Google docs we write in, the podcasts we stream... It all has to exist somewhere. To happen somehow. And that somewhere and somehow is data centers.
But. We’ve been doing all that for a while. And, though it’s been growing, ‘the cloud’ is far from new. So, why’s it all of a sudden getting so much bigger?
Indra: I think, at least like 10 years ago, the impact wasn't as big, but I think the topic changed the moment generative AI started.
AI. And not just any AI, but ‘generative AI’ to be specific.
Indra: Like we always talk about that, yeah we have this data center build out because “AI needs more data centers”. But actually it's mostly just generative AI that needs all these data centers.
“Generative AI” is the stuff produced by large language models – like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. These models generate new text, images, videos, music... based on what they’ve learned from the oodles of content that they’ve been trained on. That generation... that involves processing billions of data across vast datasets, requiring thousands of GPUs to calculate probabilities simultaneously.
That's different to a lot of traditional AI software or regular internet and computer stuff, and powering it requires a whole lot more compute.
Basically, when you send your request... to a large language model like ChatGPT it heads to a data center where it sets off a cascade of computations on hundreds of servers at once. Seconds later, voila, you have an answer.
With this new technology, 'data center' has taken on a whole new meaning.
And tech companies are in a race to build them. In the first three months of this year alone, those four companies I mentioned earlier (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta), they spent over 130 billion – mostly on building data centers. That is a casual 43 billion dollars a month.
Investments in generative AI are soaring to such a degree; analysts predict demand for data center capacity could almost triple by 2030.
Indra: ...they need AI and AI and AI. It's always mostly about AI. And this is why we need those data centers in Germany.
We’ll be back after this short break.
Trailer
Charli: And we’re back. So. Data centers have existed among us for some time. Often hiding in nondescript warehouses on the outskirts of town or relegated to industrial zones. But now there are more and more of them, they’re getting closer and closer to where people live. And that is not always going down well.
Holger: So, we were hit by surprise, I would say. Svenja, two or three years ago, right? ... We, by accident, just found out that they will build something here in our neighborhood.
Holger Sachs again, from Hattersheim. I’m talking to him and Svenja on Zoom, back before my visit.
Holger: ...when we found out, Svenja started her petition here.
Svenja jumped into action. She started a petition against the data center campus proposal – citing fears of noise pollution, water contamination and irreversible degradation to the local natural environment. She collected 1500 signatures from local residents and handed it to the mayor.
Holger: But at the end, they didn't care. They said: 'We will do this anyway'.
On July 3, 2024, the regional association approved to rezone the area from a natural to industrial zone by majority vote – an essential step to achieve planning approval for the data center.
Holger: And unfortunately, our local, I say the majority of the people in this local parliament are from one party and this party is led by our mayor who is actually in the German Data Center Association. He is in the board of this.
Svenja has since formed a local citizens’ g roup in opposition to the project. BiENe it’s called for short – it stands for citizens’ initiative for nature conservation. 10 local residents sit on the board of this group. In between their day jobs, they organize meetings, share information, and try to get the word out: data centers are not welcome here.
Svenja, who lives with her mother 150m up the road from the proposed center, said the stress from the construction noise, the loss of their green oasis and the fear of what's to come are taking a mental and physical toll.
Svenja: Sometimes I said goodbye to my hometown actually already. Ok now I’m crying. Because I think I don’t want to live here anymore. Not with that Stadtpolitik.
But not everyone is opposed to this particular data center campus. Even Svenja’s direct neighbours who live in the same building.
Svenja: I don't understand it. We we have a good connection actually, but they are all not interested in supporting us because they say yeah the Bürgermeister promised Fernwärme...
Some of them, she explains, are hoping to benefit from the waste heat generated by the centers. Something that has been proposed to be delivered to the surrounding community, reducing monthly heating bills.
Svenja's not convinced. She is skeptical about the technical feasibility of connecting old houses to such a heating system, and fears, in order to pay for it, property taxes would likely increase. Plus, she doesn’t trust the mayor, or the company, for that matter.
Svenja: Aber das ist etwas vollkommen anderes. Es steht völlig in den Sternen. Und das hat der Bürgermeister überhaupt nicht im Blick....
Last year, the citizens’ group filed a lawsuit challenging the rezoning. The case is now before the courts. But because the lawsuit doesn’t automatically stop construction, down the road, NTT Data is forging ahead. If the citizens’ group wins its case, that construction will have to stop.
Svenja: They try to push it forward as fast as they actually can. And to make a statement like we want to do this and we are going to do this and no matter what you citizens are saying.
Svenja and Holger and their citizens' initiative are not alone.
As data center construction surges, so too does opposition towards it.
Communities living near these projects are complaining of noise pollution, strained power grids, rising utility bills, stretched water supplies, more fossil fuels, and the sheer scale of what is being built.
And increasingly, they’re taking developers to court. Since 2020, legal challenges against data centers have risen sharply. In the US alone, local opposition is estimated to have blocked or delayed roughly 64 billion dollars' worth of data center projects.
Hattersheim, as it turns out, is just one small part of a much bigger story.
Before I leave Svenja, I ask her if we can take a quick trip into town.
There’s something else I want to see.
Standing in front of the construction zone earlier at the end of Svenja’s street, I could see that it was big. But it was hard to imagine what’s to come. During my research, I’d seen some AI-generated visualisations of the data center that the company, NTT Data, was building. But still, I couldn’t really picture it. I’d never seen a data center up close.
Out here, in the former ‘Chocolate Quarter’, a short drive from Svenja’s street, is NTT Data’s original data center campus in Hattersheim. Frankfurt 4 it’s called.
Data centers are, by design, pretty nondescript. But I’ll describe what I saw anyway.
Before us rose not just one, not two, but five18 buildings with jet black facades, surrounded by tall, high security metal fences. Stark. Anonymous. Enormous.
To be there, next to one of these things, and to walk around its periphery, gives you a sense of the scale of this buildout. Of ‘the digital universe’ we're building. My brain felt like it was short circuiting trying to imagine just how many computer chips this thing could hold?
I really wanted to go inside. But you can’t exactly just knock on the door.
The weeks prior, I’d be trying to organise a visit. I wanted to see one of these things from the inside, to better understand the industry’s story, to see what ‘sustainable’ data center operations look like. But even though many of them offer tours on their websites, I kept getting knocked back from data center companies. They said they were ‘busy’ or, after initial enthusiasm, they changed their minds due to ‘internal considerations’.
Then, an email arrived.
NTT Data would be pleased to invite me on a tour of their facility. Thursday, 2pm, Hattersheim.
So, see you there. In part two of The Cloud Comes to Town. From Living Planet.
This Living Planet miniseries was created by me, Charli Shield, and Neil King. It was reported and written by me, a human, not a robot, and it was edited by Neil King. I can attest that he, too, is human. If you rate this Living Planet episode, you’d make us so happy by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube. If you want to reach us directly, email us at livingplanet@dw.com or leave us a voicenote at speakpipe.com/livingplanet. See you next week.