Utility firm Stadtwerke Lübeck has launched its first self-operated data center in the northern German city of Lübeck.

Designed to enhance the city’s digital sovereignty, the facility will support business-critical and sensitive applications for businesses located in the municipality and is equipped with multiple redundancies.

While Stadtwerke Lübeck has not released details about the data center’s exact construction cost in euros, the firm did confirm to DCD that it had invested a “low single‑digit million [euro] figure.”

“The data center is a milestone for Lübeck,” said the CEO of the Lübeck Municipal Utilities Group, Dr. Jens Meier, in a statement. “With the data center, we are securing local data sovereignty, increasing the resilience of central systems, and creating a competitive advantage for businesses, public administration, and companies in critical infrastructure sectors.”

Demand for the data center’s services was reportedly so high that almost every available slot in the facility was fully occupied by the end of its first phase of development, the company said. Its construction follows a survey by Lübeck’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce in August 2022 of 156 of its member companies, which found that half said that they could envision using a regional data center, seeing clear advantages over a foreign facility in respect to data sovereignty, regional contacts, and availability.

Lübeck’s new municipal data center will be powered by two 100kW heat and power plants currently being constructed in the local area. While the primary customer for electrical power from these new plants will be the data center, surplus electricity will feed into the wider grid, while waste heat from the structures will be diverted to heat homes in the nearby district of Geniner Ufer. Solar panels on the roof of the data center supplying 180-200kWp will provide an additional power source for the site, while waste heat from the servers will be used to warm adjacent rooms in the building.

Central systems in the data center have also been equipped with multiple redundancies to protect against interruptions in the network and the threat of cyberattacks. It was for this reason, a Stadtwerke Lübeck Gruppe spokesperson told Energate Messenger, that the launch date for the facility was delayed from September 2024 until this year. “At the same time, aspects of sector coupling were integrated more comprehensively into the overall concept – including the planning consideration of further expansion stages,” they said.

Stadtwerke Lübeck Gruppe confirmed that further expansion of the data center has been approved for later this year, and will result in three times more capacity on site, including for high-performance and AI-based computing applications.

Lübeck is part of Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, just northeast of Hamburg. While Germany’s largest data center market is in Frankfurt, Hamburg, along with Düsseldorf, Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Falkenstein have secondary hubs in the country, each with around 30 facilities listed by DataCenterMap.

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.