Description
Frankfurt is the second largest of the four primary FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris) data centre markets in Europe. It will continue to remain slightly behind London in terms of built out MW capacity as the boundaries of both markets expand to meet continued strong demand. Frankfurt built-out capacity will exceed 1GW by the end of 2025 and tip over 2GW in 2029. Structure Research is tracking 2.7GW of credible future capacity at various stages of construction/planning.
Frankfurt is highly constrained and preleasing levels are high. The market has already pushed out further east (to Hanau) and southwest (to Mainz), and new developments by CloudHQ (288MW) and NTT GDC (482MW) will extend it even further south.
Frankfurt continues to be a strong growth story driven by hyperscale cloud, strict data residency regulations, high barriers to entry for self-builds, and the ability to serve a wider market both in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. However, growth is being slowed by land availability, high power costs and power scarcity, a burdensome regulatory regime, and lengthy planning timelines. A new coalition government came into power in May 2025 and has pledged to promote Germany as a data centre location, speed up, simplify and clarify regulatory processes, and foster increased digitalisation in a country where cloud takeup is still in the early stages.
There is AI demand in Frankfurt but not the available capacity to meet it. Some future projects have been redesigned, likely to deliver higher power densities, but large AI training workloads will go to other areas of Germany. Berlin was an early contender but is already facing power constraints in some parts of the market. Google has abandoned its plans to self-build there given that the power that came with the land it acquired in 2022 is not suited to AI compute needs. Microsoft is planning three self-builds near Cologne in the west of the country, an area that is also being put forward for an EU AI GigaFactory by Deutsche Telekom, Brookfield and NVIDIA.
This report is an excellent resource for any service provider, investor, real estate developer or enterprise end user looking to understand and project the data centre market in Frankfurt, or find a service provider. Structure Research now has DCAI reports for the European FLAP markets plus Milan and Madrid in southern Europe, as well as a DCI Market Spotlight report on Rome. The methodology applied continues to be the most robust in the industry. The supporting dataset is built from comprehensive asset-level tracking, capacity is measured purely on a power basis, and inventory is aggregated in tiers according to build status, absorption rates and maximum capacity levels.
