Germany’s Max Planck Society is set to build a new data center in the Bavarian city of Munich.

As reported by Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German research institution has been granted approval for a new facility in Martinsried, a village in the municipality of Planegg located south of Munich.

The Max Planck Society first filed to build a new data center in the area last year as part of a wider campus renovation, but was denied by the Planegg municipal council – partly over concerns about the size of the building and partly due to the potential energy and sustainability concerns. The municipal council has now approved the modified plans. Previous reports suggest the organization originally planned to develop a 3,120 sqm (33,583 sq ft) facility totaling around 15MW.

The Free State of Bavaria has provided €500 million ($581m) for the new campus redevelopment. The first phase could reportedly go live by 2027, with full build-out coming by 2037.

The waste heat will be made available to third parties. A total of five new medium-voltage substations are being built as part of the campus renovations.

Originally, the data center was planned to be built on the site of the institute’s former greenhouses. The new location for the data center is now planned on what is currently a parking area.

Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is an association of German research institutes. It supports research in the natural, life, and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities, across its 84 institutes and research facilities. Max Planck has operated a biochemistry-focused campus in Martinsried since the 1970s.

Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is an association of German research institutes. It supports research in the natural, life, and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities across its 84 institutes and research facilities. Max Planck has operated a biochemistry-focused campus in Martinsried since the 1970s.

The society said it will benefit from a shared data center for all research institutes of the Max Planck Society. By existing computing capacity at the Garching campus, the new facility will “accelerate calculations, improve collaboration, and enable data-intensive analyses.”

The facility will be operated by the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF, formerly known as RZG), a cross-institutional computing center of the Max Planck Society. The MPCDF operates the Raven and Viper supercomputers, as well as several smaller compute clusters and a cloud service, mostly out of a site in the Garching area north of Munich.

Raven is a Lenovo system equipped with Intel Xeon IceLake processors and Nvidia A100 GPUs; Viper is an Eviden system equipped with AMD Epyc Genoa and Instinct MI300A APUs.