Rather than chasing capacity in Frankfurt, Europe’s largest data centre market, the operator chose one of Germany’s most important industrial regions. The facility ultimately delivers 6,160m² of white space and 11.2MW of IT capacity as part of a wider 20MW campus vision.
For AtlasEdge, STR001 reflects a broader industry shift. Their strategy brings digital infrastructure closer to enterprise, manufacturing, and AI workloads – driving demand outside traditional hub markets.
To discover more about the new facility, Capacity spoke to Georg Raiser, managing director of AtlasEdge’s DACH region.
Building beyond the FLAP markets
For decades, Frankfurt has dominated Germany’s data centre landscape. But, as a company located in Stuttgart, AtlasEdge is focused on serving metropolitan regions outside the country’s primary hub. This focus didn’t change even as the company began planning STR001.
“In 2016, we decided to focus on pure data, pure colocation, and pure data centres,” Raiser told Capacity.
“We wanted to cover the metropolitan areas in Germany, but outside Frankfurt. While you can find big enterprise companies there – which were traditionally our customers – regions like Stuttgart, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia all have significant demand.”
That strategy is particularly relevant in Stuttgart, a region synonymous with automotive manufacturing, engineering and industrial innovation. Home to companies such as Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, and Bosch, the area generates substantial demand for low-latency digital infrastructure close to where data is created and consumed.
“Stuttgart is a very strong economic region,” Raiser added. “You have automotive companies, suppliers, banks, insurers, and telecommunications providers that need premium colocation facilities with strong certifications and efficient infrastructure.”
AtlasEdge’s result is a carrier-neutral facility designed to support a mix of enterprise, cloud, and increasing AI workloads without requiring customers to rely on capacity hundreds of kilometres away.
Meeting the need for speed
Another distinctive aspect of STR001 is how it was built.
AtlasEdge used a modular construction approach that allowed the first phase to progress from an empty site to customer-ready infrastructure in less than a year.
“In July 2024 there was more or less nothing on the site; just a slab and grass,” explained Raiser. “The first modules arrived, and within two weeks all of them were assembled. Beginning of 2025 we were ready for service for our first customers.”
Approximately 40 prefabricated modules were delivered and installed during the first construction phase, significantly accelerating deployment timelines. Raiser said: “[AtlasEdge] can provide a from-nothing-to-ready service for the customer in nine to 12 months.”
As AI demand accelerates, flexibility is becoming increasingly valuable. Raiser explained that their third customer base, hyperscalers, has seen sharp growth over the last five to ten years: “We see it every day in our pipeline.”
Furthermore, while the company serves traditional enterprise and cloud deployments, it is seeing growing demand from GPU-as-a-service providers and AI-focused operators looking for capacity closer to end users.
To meet this demand, building fast and keeping flexible growth in mind was key to developing the facility.
Sustainable practices built in
Sustainability is another core component of the STR001 proposition.
The facility operates using 100% renewable electricity and employs indirect free adiabatic cooling alongside hot and cold aisle containment to minimise energy consumption.
AtlasEdge says all of its facilities operate with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3 or below, aligning with increasingly stringent German efficiency requirements for data centres.
Raiser argued that energy efficiency has become both an environmental and commercial imperative: “The lower the PUE is, the better it is, both for ecological reasons and economic reasons. Otherwise, you are paying twice for the power you use.”
The company is also exploring opportunities to reuse waste heat generated by its facilities.
“We are in contact with the authorities in most of the cities where we are located,” Raiser said. “The goal is to make plans for how we can provide that heat in the future. It is a collaboration between us and the cities.”
STR001 additionally complies with Germany’s Energy Efficiency Act requirements and holds certifications including EN 50600 Level 3 and ISO 27001.
Regional markets step into the spotlight
Across Europe, public opposition to large-scale data centres, grid constraints and land shortages are making it harder to build in established hub markets. At the same time, growing AI and enterprise demand is increasing the need for infrastructure closer to regional economic centres.
For AtlasEdge, that creates opportunities in cities that historically sat outside mainstream investment conversations. In these conversations, latency requirements, redundancy requirements, and customer proximity are crucial factors, said Raiser.
“For many enterprise customers, especially banks, there are limits on how far away a secondary data centre can be. It’s important they stay online, so the limit is usually 30 – 40 kilometres from the first data centre to the second. Most of the companies are in big cities, so that’s where the data centres often meet them. However, there are other customer segments [that don’t need this] such as cloud and AI.”
The company believes that a distributed model will become increasingly important as organisations balance performance requirements, sustainability objectives, and data sovereignty demands.
“Governments are most keen to keep their data local. For example, a German government entity won’t want to be reliant on a data centre in France – even if it is the closest one.”
Raiser explained that having data centres outside of traditional cities also offers local bodies more security for their data: “Germany itself has 16 areas; the Stuttgart government wouldn’t want to have their data centre in Berlin – and so on it goes. That’s why it’s best to spread smaller facilities over the country, rather than have half of Europe rely on one or two large-scale facilities.”
Rather than competing directly with hyperscale operators in Frankfurt, London or Amsterdam, AtlasEdge intends to deepen its presence in secondary metropolitan markets across Germany, Austria, Spain and Portugal.
“We won’t be the big fish in Frankfurt or the FLAP markets,” Raiser said. “Our strategy is to strengthen our market-leading position in the areas we’re already in, and continue growing where we already have strong relationships with customers.”
If Frankfurt represented the first chapter of Europe’s current data centre boom, STR001 suggests the next phase may be written elsewhere. For operators willing to build closer to industrial clusters and regional demand centres, more doors of opportunity have opened.
“The market is growing,” Raiser concluded. “You can feel it. It is really happening now.”
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