Summary
- HOCHTIEF and Turner subsidiary Dornan have won a several-hundred-million-euro contract to build a 36MW NTT data centre in Berlin.
- Construction is due to begin in June 2026, with first data halls scheduled for handover in 2028 and full completion targeted for 2029.
- The contract brings civil works, MEP delivery, safety systems, and management controls into Germany’s data centre delivery chain.
HOCHTIEF and Turner subsidiary Dornan have been awarded a contract by NTT Global Data Centers to build a 36MW data centre in Berlin, with the project valued at several hundred million euros.
The facility will be delivered by an integrated team from HOCHTIEF Infrastructure and Dornan. Construction is due to begin in June 2026, the first data halls are scheduled to be handed over in 2028, and full completion is targeted for 2029.
The scheme includes a three-storey data centre and a four-storey office building. The contractor scope covers electrical and mechanical engineering, as well as safety and management systems, putting the most schedule-sensitive parts of the facility directly inside the delivery package. The project details are set out in Turner’s project update.
Germany’s data halls enter the contractor ledger
Germany’s data centre market is moving deeper into the machinery of mainstream infrastructure delivery. HOCHTIEF said it secured €16.8 billion of new data centre orders in 2025, with the segment representing 21% of backlog. That level of exposure gives the sector a place alongside transport, energy, industrial, and public infrastructure in the contractor economy.
A 36MW facility in Berlin is not simply a shell with IT rooms. It depends on power distribution, mechanical plant, fire systems, security, control platforms, phased commissioning, and the ability to coordinate civil, structural, electrical, and mechanical packages over several years. The first halls may be due in 2028, but the decisions that determine whether they can be energised begin now: long-lead equipment, cable routing, switchgear interfaces, cooling layouts, controls integration, and commissioning sequencing.
Berlin adds a different pressure point to Germany’s data centre map. Frankfurt remains the country’s dominant interconnection and colocation hub, but growth is spreading as operators look for land, grid options, political support, and regional demand outside the tightest established clusters. The German market still has demand from cloud, enterprise, public-sector, AI, and connectivity workloads, yet buildable capacity increasingly depends on power availability, local permitting, and contractor bandwidth.
Dornan’s involvement through Turner gives the project a specialist MEP route inside a large contractor group. That combination is becoming more common as data centre owners seek teams that can manage complex technical delivery rather than simply build the envelope. The risk in a data centre build is concentrated where disciplines meet: electrical rooms and cooling systems, fire suppression and white space, building management systems and operational procedures, grid connection and internal redundancy.
The critical path is technical
AI and cloud growth have increased the penalty for late delivery. A delayed data hall can strand customer commitments, push back revenue, and force operators to rework deployment plans. Contractors therefore have to manage data centre programmes around the physical realities of equipment supply, testing, commissioning, and handover, rather than treating them as standard commercial buildings.
Germany’s wider construction and energy markets add further tension. Data centre projects are competing for transformers, switchgear, electrical engineers, controls specialists, commissioning teams, and grid upgrades at the same time as the country is investing in industrial decarbonisation and energy-transition infrastructure. The practical constraint is not demand. It is the ability to turn capital and permits into powered, cooled, certified space.
HOCHTIEF’s backlog shows where that work is accumulating. Large contractors that repeatedly deliver data centres can carry lessons from one programme to the next: prefabrication strategy, plantroom sequencing, cable containment, modular electrical rooms, site logistics, commissioning governance, and supplier coordination. That repeatability can reduce risk, although it cannot remove grid and equipment constraints entirely.
NTT’s Berlin project now moves into a multi-year delivery window in which the data centre’s commercial value will depend on hard construction execution. Announced megawatts have become common in Europe. Energised, handed-over megawatts remain scarcer, and the route between the two runs through the contractor’s programme.
