Google is investing one billion euros in Germany

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Google data center in the USA (archive):

Photo: Google / dpa

Google plans to invest around one billion euros in Germany by 2030.

The US Internet company announced that the money will go to the construction of two new data centers in Hanau and in the greater Berlin area and the expansion of renewable energy in Germany.

The cloud system in Hanau is only 20 kilometers away from the world's largest Internet node DE-CIX, said Philipp Justus, Google's head of Central Europe.

The four-story building with a usable area of ​​around 10,000 square meters will be fully operational in the coming year.

At the same time, Google will set up a new Berlin-Brandenburg cloud region.

The exact location of the servers was not disclosed.

Wind parks and photovoltaics should ensure CO2-free electricity

The main purpose of the various cloud regions is to bring your own services closer to customers.

This significantly reduces data runtimes (latency) compared to a transatlantic data connection.

There are also legal and regulatory reasons for customers to work better on cloud computers that are located in Germany instead of using systems in the USA.

A significant part of the Google investment goes into the production of renewable energy in Germany, because the data centers are also huge consumers of electricity.

Since 2017, Google has been offsetting its worldwide annual electricity consumption by purchasing green electricity.

Google has now announced that the local energy partner Engie Deutschland from Cologne will feed more than 140 megawatts (MW) of solar and wind energy into the German grid in the coming years.

This included a new 39 MW photovoltaic system and the maintenance of 22 wind farms.

This is to ensure that "from 2022, around 80 percent of the energy supplied to the Google infrastructure every hour comes from CO2-free sources."

apr / dpa