Construction firm Hochtief has broken ground on a new wooden Edge data center it is building for Yexio in Dorfen, Germany.

It has started work on the data center, which will be built on a 7,500 sqm (80,729 sq ft) site at the Southwest Industrial Park in Dorfen, a town in the Erding region of Bavaria, east of Munich.

The data center will provide compute power and Edge services for customers across Erding when it goes live in the third quarter of 2027.

Hubert Aiwanger, Bavarian minister of economic affairs, said the project was “a strong signal for Bavaria’s digital future.”

He said: “We are deliberately bringing high-tech to rural areas and combining digital infrastructure with tangible benefits for the local population – for example, by feeding waste heat into the district heating network.

“In this way, we are strengthening data sovereignty, security of supply, and regional value creation equally.”

Hochtief, which is owned by Spanish construction company ACS, has moved into developing and operating its own data centers, with a network of 15 liquid-cooled, wooden frame Edge sites planned across Germany under the Yexio name and built by the construction firm’s PPP Solutions division.

The data center in Dorfen is set to be largely leased to Hochtief–owned cloud provider Yorizon, which is also backed by server manufacturer Thomas-Krenn AG.

The data center will be built using solid wood, which saves approximately 600 tons of CO2 compared to conventional concrete buildings, Hochtief said. It will use liquid cooling, and has the potential to scale to 4MW should demand require. Waste heat from the facility could eventually be connected to a district heating system in the town.

“Digital infrastructure must function sustainably, both economically and ecologically,” said Bernd Holtwick, managing director of Hochtief PPP Solutions. “Our model combines financing, construction, and operation into a reliable, single-source solution. This provides municipalities with the necessary planning security and, through consistent sector coupling, enables an effective concept that directly benefits the local energy balance.”

Hochtief has also broken ground on Yexio data centers in Bad Lippspringe and Essen, with the latter due to have gone live last year. It also has a 2MW data center in the works in Herne, Germany.