The American technology company Alphabet (Google) is significantly expanding its presence in Germany.

The central components of a more than one billion euros investment program are a data center in Hanau near Frankfurt, a new cloud infrastructure in the Berlin-Brandenburg area and a contract with the energy supplier Engie to obtain predominantly climate-neutral electricity in Germany from next year.

Alexander Armbruster

Responsible editor for Wirtschaft Online.

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"Germany has always been a very important country for Google, we opened our second office outside of the United States here 20 years ago," said Google Germany boss Philipp Justus of the FAZ for us in the future. "

The new facility on Marie-Curie-Strasse in Hanau accommodates four floors and around ten thousand square meters of computing infrastructure on which data from users of the company's cloud services is processed.

Google had commissioned the data center provider NDC-Garbe with the construction, on Monday the official handover of the keys to the building complex took place.

Google is increasingly establishing the cloud division as a pillar of income alongside the advertising business, which is still dominant, and which is based on targeted ads in the search or on the YouTube video platform. Competition has increased in recent years, especially among the large cloud providers. In terms of business volume, Google is currently in third place behind the American Internet companies Amazon and Microsoft. In the past few months, however, the group has confirmed its claim to make up ground with cooperation agreements with Lufthansa, Deutsche Bank and mail order company Otto.In terms of personnel, Google has long since repositioned itself for this purpose in Germany and successfully poached managers who are experienced in business with corporate customers, such as the former Managing Director of SAP Germany, Daniel Holz, who is now responsible for Google's cloud business in Germany and Central Europe.

At the same time, the new investment plan shows that a regional presence remains technically necessary in this business area, although data can now be transmitted over the Internet at lightning speed. "The physical proximity to our customers is important in the cloud area, it is about latency, performance and availability", explains cloud manager Holz and cites e-commerce as an example of corresponding applications in the millisecond range. “Users expect recommendations in real time.” As a further argument for the location in Hanau, Holz cites the important De-CIX internet hub in the neighboring Main metropolis of Frankfurt.