Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to develop data centers outside Frankfurt in Schöneck and Maintal, in the Hesse region of Germany.

Revealed by Mayor Carina Wacker and reported by the Frankfurter Rundschau, AWS will invest "more than €1 billion" in the data center in Schöneck alone.

Schöneck and Maintal are both municipalities on the outskirts of Frankfurt am Main, Germany's major data center hub.

The data center will sit on a seven-hectare site in the Kilianstädten North II industrial park. Further details, including the number of data center buildings and construction times, have not been shared.

The land in question was part of a bidding process, with some 45 companies keen to purchase the site. On November 10, Mayor Wacker was said to have informed the "winner" (now known to be AWS) that its data center project had been selected. 29 council members voted in favor of the AWS project, while four abstained.

Another data center project proposed for the site was a Hetzner Online GmbH data center campus.

The proceeds from the deal with AWS will be used by the council to settle its debt and reinvest in the area.

According to the FR, a power capacity agreement has been struck, which Mayor Wacker described as a "stroke of luck."

In June 2024, AWS said it would invest $9.44bn in its Frankfurt cloud region by 2026. No details about planned data centers were shared at the time.

AWS launched its Frankfurt region back in 2014; it was the company's second European cloud region after Dublin.

The cloud giant also hosts its European Sovereign Cloud subsidiary in Germany, which is housed in data centers in the state of Brandenburg.

In 2024, Sirius Real Estate sold a Frankfurt business park site in Maintel to an unnamed data center developer for €40.1 million ($43.2m). It is unclear if this is linked to the new AWS data center plans.