Renewable energy developer Telis Energie Deutschland has announced plans to build a 500MW data center campus outside Hanover in Germany’s northwestern state of Lower Saxony.

If completed, the data center will be one of the country’s largest.

The site north of the town of Mehrum will stretch over 4.09 million sq ft (380,000 sqm) and host six, 25-meter-high (82 ft) buildings, with construction beginning in 2028 and lasting up to two years.

According to Telis Energie, the project is still in its initial planning stages, with full approval from the local municipality yet to be received.

DCD has approached the firm for comment.

Mehrum is located near Hanover and around 155km (96 miles) south of Hamburg. Hanover has a small data center market, though Hamburg has a much larger presence. Neither is on par with Germany’s data center hotspot of Frankfurt.

The site of the proposed data center campus is currently farmland. Eventually, the six-building site will host multiple tenants, with electricity supplied via high-voltage lines from a new gas-fired power station. The construction of at least one additional substation is also planned.

In statements provided to the local building committee seen by NDR.de, Telis Energie said it anticipates the project will create up to 80 permanent roles for technicians, security personnel, and IT specialists.

In a separate interview with Peiner Allgemeine Zeitung, Telis Energie’s managing director, Dr. Florian Zickfeld, said that the firm expects to invest at least €1 billion ($1.14bn) in the overall project.

Telis Energie Deutschland is a subsidiary of the Telis Energy Group, which was itself founded in 2022 by the investment firm Carlyle. With its headquarters in London, the former company was created to develop a renewable energy project pipeline of over 10GW in Spain, France, the UK, and Germany.

Carlyle has also previously possessed stakes in Airtel’s Nxtra data center unit and acquired Edge, US colocation and cloud firm Involta (later rebranded as ‘Ark Data Centers’) in May 2024. The company has additionally pursued data center development projects of its own in recent years.

Earlier this month, it was tapped by the US Army alongside operator CyrusOne to build two new data centers at military sites in Texas and Utah.

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.