Google Frankfurt data center, Hanau, Hessen

Google's Frankfurt-area data center stands on Marie-Curie-Strasse in the Wolfgang technology park of Hanau, a city in the Main-Kinzig district of Hesse, Germany, and it was the first cloud data center Google owned in Germany when it opened in October 2023. The four-story building holds about 10,000 square meters of computing space and serves Google's Frankfurt cloud region, which is about 20 kilometers from the DE-CIX internet exchange.

The developer NDC-Garbe built the first building and sold it to Google, which in 2021 bought the whole 20,000-square-meter plot, leaving room for two more data centers of the same size, according to the city of Hanau. The site replaced a plutonium bunker, a leftover of the industry that once gave Hanau the nickname "Atomdorf". Mayor Claus Kaminsky argued at the 2021 handover that if Hanau turned such projects away, neighboring towns would build them anyway and Hanau would feel the effects without any say or share of the benefits. Google said at the opening that at least 80 percent of the site's energy would be carbon-free, that air-based cooling would keep water use as low as possible, and that it was studying whether its waste heat could supply neighboring buildings in the Wolfgang industrial park.

Now the site is growing. In November 2025 Google said it would invest 5.5 billion euros in cloud and AI infrastructure in Germany, mainly in a new data center in Dietzenbach, in Offenbach district, and in expanding Hanau. Google broke ground on the Hanau expansion on April 28, 2026, with the Hesse state government saying the site would create at least 100 direct jobs and that Google was working with 44 German suppliers, 16 of them from Hesse. "Hessen ist das Herz des europäischen Datenverkehrs und bildet das Rückgrat der digitalen Wirtschaft in Europa", said Minister-President Boris Rhein at the groundbreaking. Google also bought land years ago in Erlensee, also in Main-Kinzig, and in Babenhausen, and has not said whether it will build there, hessenschau reported.

The Hesse state government backs the build-out through its regional data center strategy, Digital Minister Kristina Sinemus said. Hanau's city hall has welcomed the site, with the local paper noting the business tax income it expects. Construction of the expansion is now under way on the Wolfgang plot; the open questions are whether Google fills the rest of it and whether the waste heat plan for neighboring buildings goes ahead.