Summary
- firstcolo has started construction of FRA7 in Rosbach vor der Höhe, with around €250m of investment and planned capacity of about 24MW.
- The facility is designed for cloud, AI, and HPC workloads, including rack densities of up to 200kW and liquid cooling.
- The project extends the Frankfurt region’s data centre footprint while linking capacity growth to renewable power, battery storage, and waste heat use.
firstcolo has started construction of FRA7 in Rosbach vor der Höhe, adding a high density data centre to the wider Frankfurt market.
The German colocation provider is investing around €250m in the project, which is planned for approximately 24MW of total capacity and scheduled to open in 2027.
Designed for cloud, AI, and high performance computing workloads, FRA7 is expected to support rack densities of up to 200kW through a combination of advanced electrical design and liquid cooling.
The facility will use certified green electricity, while battery storage systems are expected to support onsite resilience and allow surplus energy to be fed back into the grid.
With a target PUE below 1.2, firstcolo is also planning to make waste heat available to the city of Rosbach vor der Höhe for at least 20 years.
The project has a defined delivery team, with Lupp responsible for the structural shell, façade, and interior fit out, while SPIE is delivering building services engineering and critical infrastructure systems.
Rosbach sits beyond Frankfurt’s most crowded data centre districts, but it remains close enough to draw on the region’s network density, cloud demand, and enterprise customer base.
That location gives the project a useful balance between proximity and buildability, as operators look for sites that can serve established metros without inheriting all their land and power constraints.
AI density changes the building
Facilities designed for 200kW racks require a different relationship between white space, power distribution, cooling plant, controls, monitoring, and maintenance access.
Liquid cooling cannot be treated as an isolated equipment choice, because coolant distribution, heat exchangers, pipe routes, pumping, redundancy, and heat rejection must be integrated into the building from the start.
The electrical design faces the same pressure, with transformer capacity, switchgear, UPS architecture, busway, rack level distribution, metering, and protection all needing to match higher and more concentrated IT loads.
Waste heat use adds another engineering and commercial layer, since heat can only serve a local network where temperature, offtake, pipework, maintenance, and demand profiles are aligned.
Battery storage also changes the power design, particularly where systems are expected to support resilience while interacting with the grid in a controlled and economically useful way.
Germany’s data centre market has become more demanding around efficiency, energy use, and local integration, especially in the Frankfurt region where growth has been visible for years.
FRA7’s combination of high density cooling, renewable power, battery systems, and waste heat planning reflects the conditions now attached to new capacity in established European hubs.
The delivery risk will sit in coordination, because civil works, electrical systems, mechanical plant, controls, and commissioning have to converge before the building can support AI and HPC loads at commercial scale.
