This week, OVHcloud ceremoniously broke ground on their second data center in Germany, in the Limburg area near Frankfurt. It will have a floor area of more than 6,000 square meters and enough for 40,000 servers, or 100 exabytes of storage. This would pave the way for OVHcloud to seek further European growth for its cloud infrastructure services in the German market and beyond. This new data center would be among the greenest of OVHcloud’s data centers.
OVHcloud announced the new data center’s construction in April this year. The building phase has started with the ceremonial groundbreaking at the industrial park near the Limburg ICE rail station and is expected to be finished in the third quarter of 2023. Prof. Dr. Kristina Sinemus, Hessian Minister for Digital Strategy and Development, Dr. Marius Hahn, Mayor of Limburg, and OVHcloud clients and partners attended the groundbreaking event.
“The value creation of companies today is unthinkable without knowledge and information in the form of data. They are the capital of a modern economy and need protected spaces where they are stored and processed,” said Falk Weinreich, General Manager Central Europe of OVHcloud in his speech. “Our challenge is to ensure that our cloud solutions have the lowest possible carbon footprint and that our data center fits perfectly into the natural environment. This is how we connect digitalization with the real world.”
Sustainable Inside and Out
All of the power required by the new data center will be obtained from renewable resources. It will also make use of OVHcloud’s proprietary water cooling technology, which uses a rainwater tank and uses only one glass of water, or 92 percent less than the industry standard, for ten hours of server operation.
The nearby offices’ underfloor heating is provided by the server’s waste heat. In addition to lowering the demand for air conditioning, an environmentally green roof, plants on the facades, and trees on the property would also help restore some of the developed area to nature and remove up to 830 kg of CO2 annually from the atmosphere.
“Data centers are the engine and prerequisite for a powerful digital economy. Hessen occupies a top position here in a national comparison,” said Prof. Dr. Kristina Sinemus, Hessian Minister for Digital Strategy and Development. “The DE-CIX network node and the high regional concentration of high-performance users, suppliers and service providers speak for the location. At the same time, however, we must also keep an eye on the high energy consumption with a view to further increasing data center capacities. With the establishment and development of the Data Center Office Hessen, we want to network actors and activities on the one hand, but also support a sustainable development of the digital infrastructure in Hesse.”
Total Capacity: 85,000 Servers
At the Limburg site, OVHcloud has already been operating a data center since 2017, which was expanded by a second hall at the end of 2018 and by a third hall in September 2021. With the addition of the new data center, the Limburg location’s capacity rises to a total of 85,000 servers. The second data center will be brand-new, as opposed to the first, which is housed in a converted structure. This would enable OVHcloud to completely customize the structure to meet its own needs.
“The construction of OVHcloud’s new data center speaks for the advantages of Limburg as a location for the digital economy,” said Dr. Marius Hahn, Mayor of Limburg. “We are proud that OVHcloud has once again decided to invest in future technologies at the Limburg site and set a milestone in sustainable data centers.”
