A data center announced for the state of Hesse, western Germany, has been canceled.. Plans by hyperscale data center operator Stack Infrastructure to build the facility outside the town of Babenhausen, southeast of Frankfurt, were abandoned amid uncertainty about the level of support afforded the project by local government..
A Stack Infrastructure data center – Stack Infrastructure. According to previous reporting by DataCenterInsider, the data center would have cost €3 billion ($3.4bn) and created up to 200 permanent jobs in the area.. In a statement provided to Hessenschau, the landowners for the site, Aumovio, a vehicle technology firm, confirmed that the project had been canceled “with great regret,” citing “protracted and uncertain processes” related to its planning application..
DCD has approached both Stack Infrastructure and Aumovio for comment.. The data center originally proposed for Babenhausen would have sprawled more than 2.9 million sq ft (270,000 sqm) on the site. Full information on Stack’s plans were not shared..
Proposed earlier this year, the project’s planning application was dogged by demands for greater transparency and sustainability by a coalition of parties in Babenhausen’s city council.. This included requests for greater reliance on renewable energy for the project, a plan for capping noise emissions, the exploration of alternative water-cooling concepts for the facility’s servers, and a €250 million ($285m) “guarantee certificate.” The mayor of Babenhausen, Dominik Stadler, derided these demands as unjustified and possibly illegal..
The state of Hesse currently boasts 171 data centers, according to DataCenters.com, mostly concentrated in the city of Frankfurt – one of Europe’s and the world’s largest data center hubs.. Demand for new facilities is currently high in Germany, which, in turn, has led to rising pressure on the country’s energy grid to support new projects and heightened skepticism from local communities.
As a result, several proposals for new data centers have been withdrawn by operators in recent months, including a facility to have been run by Google in Berlin-Brandenburg and a 174MW facility proposed by Vantage Data Centers outside Frankfurt.. Learn more about the data center market in Switzerland and the wider DACH region, and meet with other executives and experts at the DCN Zurich event later this year..
More in Construction & Site Selection. 05 Feb 2026. More in Europe.
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