A six acre site in Frankfurt has been acquired by Digital Realty to expand its datacenter, colocation and interconnection business to Germany, a country with some of the strictest data protection rules in the world. The additional location will increase the company’s global coverage and help it address the issues of data sovereignty in Europe.

Digital Realty said the establishment of a foothold in this region has been a target for some time but it has been seeking a suitable location. The new site is just three miles from the business centre of Frankfurt and has cost the company $6 million. The plan is to build a 27MW campus comprising three buildings covering a total of 31,600 square metres (340,000 square feet).

Willkommen in Deutschland

Chris Kenney, senior vice president for Digital Realty’s international division, said, “Frankfurt is one of the most important datacenter markets in the world – second in size only to London in the European region. Furthermore, it is considered the connectivity, commercial and financial capital of Germany.”

Kenney’s research showed that Frankfurt’s business space vacancy rate, especially the amount of datacenter space available, is approaching an all-time low but demand has improved significantly over the past few years, due in large part to cloud adoption and growing concerns over data sovereignty laws.

Digital Realty’s CEO William Stein added, “We have begun the local entitlement process and expect to be in a position to break ground later in 2016, with the goal of delivering the first datacenter suite in the second half of 2017, subject to market demand.”

He explained that the move to develop this site in Frankfurt is based on speculation that this region will continue to show considerable growth in the coming years.

Digital Realty currently has a presence in the UK, Ireland, France, Holland and Switzerland, as well as in the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Australia.