StackIT, part of Lidl owner Schwarz Group, has big plans. A datacenter graded for up to 200 megawatts will be built in Lübbenau, Germany.
The datacenter will be operational by 2027. The site in Lübbenau, an hour and a half’s drive south of Berlin, is 13 hectares in size. A large Kaufland logistics center has already stood there since 1996, as reported by the local news agency RBB24. First of all, the immense campus will house local data from Schwarz brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as provide space for data processing for third parties.
Residual heat and a substation
It is already the Schwarz Group’s fourth location in the region. A five-story administration building and a substation will be built. The company says the additional capacity is needed to be prepared for all possible outages. However, this is the first StackIT location in Lübbenau. The other sites are in southwest Germany and Austria.
The municipality hopes to use the residual heat from the new location for its own heat network. As with the total construction costs, the financial arrangement hasn’t been made public. After all, an operator needs something in return for providing energy to a third party, if only to accommodate the additional complexity at the time of construction.
Read more: Sustainability in datacenters: where do things stand?
StackIT has big ambitions
We have written before about Schwarz Digits, of which StackIT is the cloud division. It has been a separate GmbH since September 1, 2023, and has only been an option for external customers for two years. SAP and Bayern Munich, among others, are already using this European public cloud.
As mentioned, StackIT is connected to Lidl and Kaufmarkt through parent company Schwarz Group, but it also implicitly makes this connection itself. The cloud player touts itself as economically stable “because we always eat,” referring to the fact that supermarkets are guaranteed to bring in money. According to StackIT, the support for Lidl and Kaufland is proof of the responsibility the cloud provider can bear.