Dietzenbach is a small German town with a population of about 35,000. Locally it is known for its open-air forest swimming pool and architecturally unusual observation tower, from which, on a clear day, you can see Frankfurt, about 12 kilometers away.
Its location is probably one of the main reasons why American tech giant Google chose to invest several billion dollars in a new, high-performance data center. The Greater Frankfurt area is one of the most important data center regions in Europe.
DE-CIX Frankfurt is the world’s leading Internet exchange. At peak times, it handles more than 17 terabytes of data traffic. This is equivalent to the amount of data processed if approximately 3.5 million people simultaneously streamed a high-definition movie. Seventy-six such data centers are already operational in the Frankfurt area. Worldwide, there are approximately 12,000 such campuses and many more are being built.
Increasing importance of data centers
The Internet is now an essential part of modern global society, and it is becoming even more important. Especially the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence requires large amounts of data. Processing and storing this data and enabling the smooth operation of cloud services and Internet applications requires huge server capacity. As a result data centers are the backbone of the modern Internet.
They are also fundamentally important to the national security of modern industrialized countries, whose economies and societies could hardly do without them. The processes required for the provision of electricity and health systems, financial management, transportation logistics and many other services are processed through these Internet exchanges.
This is why data centers in Germany are classified as part of the country’s critical infrastructure and provided with special protection. In March 2026, the federal government published a new national data center strategy, highlighting how important they are. It plans to double Germany’s data center capacity by 2030 and also aims to reduce its dependence on non-European providers.
weak center
The fact that almost everything online now passes through data centers makes these campuses a prime target. Cyber attacks have increased rapidly in recent years. In January 2026, the German Federal Bank reported that it recorded more than 5,000 cyberattacks every minute on its IT systems alone. Data centers are usually well protected from such attacks and potential saboteurs.
Data center building complexes are typically secured with video cameras, fences, and barbed wire. And with good reason: a massive fire in March 2021 in Strasbourg, one of Europe’s largest data centres, showed that even physical damage to a hub can have far-reaching consequences. Over 3.6 million websites were shut down and many customers lost their data forever because their backups were stored in the same building.
Strategic targets for attack?
Data centers have also become strategic targets in military conflicts. For example, in the war in Ukraine, IT infrastructure has been specifically targeted with the aim of blocking military operations and massively disrupting civilian supply lines.
Data centers in the Persian Gulf have also come under attack. Tehran has fired drones and rockets at three complexes in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in the US-Israeli war with Iran. These belonged to US cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the attacks caused massive disruption to banking, payment platforms and other systems.
Shortly after, the Iranian leadership published a list on Telegram along with 30 other potential targets that are part of the US IT technology infrastructure in the Gulf. These included data centers, research facilities, and offices of various tech giants such as IBM, Google, Palantir, and Oracle. Since then there has been much discussion about how data centers can be better protected by air defense.
Big investment, big concerns
That is why it is becoming increasingly important to find suitable locations where new data centers can be built and reliably secured. However, people living near these projects are often not happy with them at all.
They criticize the large amounts of energy and water data centers require to operate their servers and cool the facilities. Their hardware also wears out very quickly, generating large amounts of electronic waste. Researchers around the world are under pressure to find ways to make the centers more efficient, utilize waste heat and power them with renewable energy.
It is also considered problematic that, although investors are often pouring billions of dollars into building the centres, hardly any jobs are created in the area. Data centers often cover thousands of square meters but usually have fewer than 100 people actually working in them. The economic benefits they provide are more likely to be indirect: for example, if other companies that depend on this IT infrastructure decide to locate near it.
Protests have already taken place in different parts of the world. In Chile in 2024, an environmental group successfully demonstrated against the construction of a data center for AI applications. And in April 2026, the legislature in the US state of Maine voted in favor of a moratorium on data centers with a capacity of more than 20 MW, citing concerns about impacts on the economy and environment. State Governor Janet Mills had to use her veto to prevent the bill from being signed.
Germany doesn’t always give the green light to new data centers either.
Construction has started in Dietzenbach, but plans for a similar project in Gross-Gerau, about 30 kilometers away, have failed. American investor Vantage Data Centers wanted to spend €2.5 billion ($2.9 billion) to build another data center here, but a majority of the city council voted against it. They argued that the project was too large and its impact on the environment and society was too unclear.
This article was translated from German.