The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has announced the construction of an AI data center at its Campus North area in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany.

The university said the facility will cost an estimated €24 million ($27.2m) and be designed to support other higher education institutions, government organizations, and researchers.

A system siphoning waste heat from the data center’s servers into the district heating network is also planned. DCD has approached KIT for comment.

“With the new data center, we’re laying the foundation for tomorrow’s research and AI applications,” said KIT’s vice-president for digitalization and sustainability, Professor Kora Kristof, in a statement. “At the same time, we use the waste heat generated to heat buildings on campus and optimize the data center’s operations in line with sustainability criteria. This strengthens our digital infrastructure and drives KIT’s decarbonization and other sustainability efforts forward.”

To be built next to a combined heat and power plant on KIT’s Campus North, construction of the data center is due to be completed by the end of 2029, with the site opening the following year.

While the project’s IT compute capacity has not been determined, it is predicted to have a power consumption of 2MW. The data center will be built in phases, with an option to scale its power supply to 10MW if demand for its services remains high.

The site’s operations will be biphasic, explained Dr. Martin Nußbaumer, a director at KIT’s Scientific Computing Center. “Our aim is to build a system that can ‘breathe’ with demand,” said Nußbaumer. “During the day, it provides more capacity for AI applications when demand for them is particularly high. At night, it uses the same infrastructure for resource-intensive simulations, for example in climate research. This helps us prevent idle capacity while also strengthening digital sovereignty through a well‑developed set of AI services that make smart use of existing resources.”

There are currently 32 data centers in Baden-Württemberg, according to DataCenters.com.

KIT is not the only higher education institution in the state to build its own data center in the past year. In December 2025, the University of Stuttgart began constructing its own supercomputer data center at its campus in the eponymous city. This was followed in August 2026 by the construction of a 78kW facility at the Caritas Hospital, a medical training facility, in Bad Mergentheim.

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.