It is no longer inside information that the Greater Frankfurt area has developed into a leading location for data centers in recent years. The reason for this is obvious: Frankfurt is located in the middle of Germany and the geographic center of the EU is only around 40 kilometers east of the financial city. This ensures fast data connectivity for many people.

Strictly speaking, the development of data centers is not just limited to the city limits of ​​Frankfurt itself. Clusters for data centers are emerging in the entire Rhine-Main region, whereby many prefer a close proximity to DE-CIX (the world’s largest Internet peering point). Hotspots for data centers in the Greater Frankfurt area are in particular the east of Frankfurt, Sossenheim, the Gallus, the Kaiserlei area in Offenbach, Hattersheim and Rüsselsheim. The reason for the regional distribution of the data centers is that, for example, a cloud provider such as AWS distributes the data across three locations and connects them together. There is usually a distance of at least 20 kilometers between the individual locations so that a nearby data center can take over in the event of a power failure.

In July 2020, Interxion announced that it would develop the former headquarters of the mail order company Neckermann into a large IT location. As a result, several data centers will be built on a large part of the Neckermann site from the first quarter of 2021. More than a billion euros are to be invested by 2028, said the managing director of Interxion Germany, Jens Prautzsch. The company already operates 15 data centers in Frankfurt and is home to the world’s largest internet node, DE-CIX. Interxion is now part of Digital Realty.

In the past, data centers in Frankfurt were built in particular at ground level in hall buildings. But those days are over in central locations. Since land prices are expensive, data centers are now being built upwards. This can be seen in an impressive way, particularly in the east of Frankfurt at the Interxion data centers site.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Global Data Center Advisory Group confirms in its latest report on European data centers that the data center market will continue to grow. The lockdown in the corona crisis had shown the need for a robust IT infrastructure, because of home office and because people used more video streaming and online games in their free time. Corresponding peaks in Internet traffic would reflect this new reality. In spring 2020, the DE-CIX reported a world record throughput of 9.1 terabits per second. This flow of data included a 50 percent increase in video conferencing and a 25 percent increase in both online gambling and social media usage.

In addition, an expansion of well over 100 MW is in full swing in Frankfurt. The global providers Digital Realty and Equinix, which operate in several clusters each, as well as the competitors Cyrusone, Iron Mountain, Colt, Interxion and Etix made a particular contribution. Many of these providers expect to gain additional hyperscalers as anchor tenants. These hyperscalers are in particular companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft etc. But not only the corona virus contributes to the growth of the data centers in Frankfurt. Data protection considerations in regards to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) also ensure that capacities are built up in Germany and not in other countries.

In July 2020, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) also overturned the so-called Privacy Shield Agreement between the EU and the USA. In many cases, legitimate data transfers have been declared illegal and incompatible with European law. As a consequence, data will increasingly be stored in Germany in the future, so that it is not transferred to areas with a different legal situation.