The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has announced plans to build an AI data center at its Campus North area in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, according to DatacenterDynamics. The university says the facility will cost an estimated €24 million ($27.2m) and is intended to support other higher education institutions, government organizations, and researchers.
The data center will be built next to a combined heat and power plant on KIT's Campus North, with a system planned to siphon waste heat from its servers into the district heating network. Construction is due to be completed by the end of 2029, with the site opening the following year. KIT's vice-president for digitalization and sustainability, Professor Kora Kristof, said the project lays "the foundation for tomorrow's research and AI applications" while using the recovered heat to warm campus buildings.
The facility's IT compute capacity has not yet been determined, but it is expected to draw 2MW of power, with an option to scale up to 10MW if demand for its services remains high. Dr. Martin Nußbaumer, a director at KIT's Scientific Computing Center, said the site's operations will be "biphasic," running AI workloads during the day and switching to resource-intensive simulations, such as climate research, at night to avoid idle capacity.
KIT is the latest university in Baden-Württemberg to build its own data center, following the University of Stuttgart's supercomputer facility, which broke ground in December 2025.