Digital Economy
Construction Underway on Huge German Data Center
Schwarz-Gruppe has broken ground on an EUR 11 billion facility in the easter German town of Lubbenau.
Nov 18, 2025
The Schwarz Digits Datacenter is the largest single investment in the history of the company, which owns supermarket chains Lidl and Kaufland.
The 13-hectare facility will include six buildings and 100,000 graphic processing units (GPUs), which can be used to train large-scale artificial intelligence models. It will occupy the site of a decommissioned coal mine.
The groundbreaking ceremony came as Germany hosted an IT summit attended by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and most of the digital ministers in Europe.
“Today we’re building the future, not talking about it,” said German Minister for Digital Affairs and State Modernization Karsten Wildberger at the groundbreaking. “In Germany, we want to be not just a customer, but a shaper of digital technologies.”
German data centers currently have a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts, which leads Europe. But further expansion is need for capacity in Germany to catch up to that in the United States and China.
