European logistics real estate firm P3 Logistic Parks is planning a large data center campus on the site of a former army barracks in Hanu, Germany.

The company announced this week that it had taken over the former Großauheim barracks in Hanau, outside Frankfurt from the Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben (Institute for Federal Real Estate) and plans to develop the P3 Datacenter Hanau data center campus on the 250,000 sqm (2.7 million sq ft) site. Terms of the land acquisition were not shared, nor was the timeline for the first phase to go live.

Construction will take place in several phases, with at least eight data center modules on a building area of around 200,000 sqm (2.1 million sq ft) to be built over a period of ten years; the site will have an electrical supply of 180MW.

P3 said the on-spec campus will be built and operated sustainably and supplied with 100 percent green electricity. The barracks – vacant since 2008 – will be decontaminated and will see the existing building stock materials recycled and reused for groundworks.

Construction of a combined heat and power plant by Gemeinschaftskraftwerk Hanau GmbH & Co. KG is also planned on the campus to provide a district heating supply for Hanau from 2024. A transformer station is also being built on the project site by the local grid operator, Hanau Netz GmbH.

Soenke Kewitz, managing director of P3 Logistic Parks Germany, said: "The e-commerce boom and increasing teleworking are making it ever more clear how important data centers are for us all. Without them, advancing digitalization is not possible and the need to meet this demand with a green alternative is enormous. We are delighted to be able to develop this future-proof solution, the P3 Datacenter Hanau, in close cooperation with the city."

Headquartered in Prague, P3 is a long-term investor, manager, and developer of European warehouse properties with more than 6.4 million sqm (68.9 million sq ft) of assets under management and a reported land bank of 1.6 million sqm (17.2 million sq ft) held for further development. It is 100 percent owned by GIC, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, which has previously invested in a number of hyperscale projects alongside Equinix.

This appears to be P3's first data center development; the company is the latest in a number of logistics & warehouse industrial real estate firms looking to move into the data center space. The likes of ESR, Prologis, GLP, Segro, and others are also looking to develop facilities in the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Semir Selcukoglu, head of data centers at P3 Logistic Parks, added: "Our project in Hanau will be one of the largest data center campuses in Europe. The exciting question we have tackled is: how can we reconcile a large-scale data center with the challenges of climate change? I am particularly proud that we found a trend-setting solution in collaboration with the city of Hanau. The project will have no negative impact on the land balance of the Rhine-Main area, as it is an already sealed area formerly used for military purposes."

After World War II, the city of Hanau was one of the largest American military bases in Europe. Originally built as a depot and taken over by the US at the end of WWII, the Grossauheim barracks (also known as Großauheim Kaserne) span approximately 38.5 hectares. Since the end of 2008, properties in Hanau used by the American armed forces with a total area of ​​approx. 340 hectares have been vacated and available for development.

Claus Kaminsky, Lord Mayor of the City of Hanau, added: "The development of the former Großauheim barracks into a data center campus that is also very large by international standards, represents for us the centerpiece of the implementation of our data center strategy. The joint development and binding definition of sustainability goals above the generally accepted level – for example, half of the energy will be fed from local renewable sources – was particularly important to us, also due to the size of the campus when construction is completed."

P3 was supported in the brokerage of the property by CBRE, A&T Industrial & Logistics division. Legal advice on the purchase was provided by the law firm Noerr.

Google is developing a data center in Hanau as part of an expansion to its Frankurt cloud region.