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UAE pledges a gigawatt of German data centre capacity before naming a builder
A joint declaration signed on 10 September puts about 1 GW of new data centres inside a EUR 40bn Emirati pledge to Germany, with no builder, location or timeline given for any of it. The signed company agreements in the same document total EUR 9.356bn.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- The UAE plans to invest EUR 40bn in Germany, including new data centres with a combined capacity of about one gigawatt, under a joint declaration announced on 10 September.
- The declaration names no builder, no location and no timeline for the data centres, gaps that AFP and Investment Monitor also noted.
- A separate declaration of intent covers exploring cooperation on data hosting and information systems through the establishment of what the text calls Data Embassies.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The capacity number sits in the joint declaration while the German government's own summary of the same package gives no figure, so a buyer citing 1 GW is citing the diplomatic text and not Berlin.
- constraint A pledge whose German half is a favourable environment cannot be scheduled, so European teams needing compute in place by 2027 get no date to plan against.
- decision German developers now have to decide whether to spend on land options and grid queue positions against a gigawatt whose sponsor has not identified an operator.
- exposure If the data embassy work becomes an instrument, residency questions for German-hosted workloads would be settled between two governments, and procurement teams would be reading treaty language alongside a vendor contract.
Anyone sizing German capacity for 2027 who opens the 10 September declaration looking for an interconnection point finds a sentence. The gigawatt travels inside a commitment to "investments in advanced digital infrastructure, including the development of new state-of-the-art data centres with a capacity of approximately 1 GW" [3]. Germany's undertaking in the same passage is to foster "a favourable environment for their implementation" [4].
A gigawatt quoted from a communique sounds like supply, and it will land in slide decks as capacity. The same declaration describes another deal exactly: the energy group XRG's investment of about EUR 15bn in the chemicals maker Covestro [20]. That passage names an investor, names a target and attaches a figure. The data centre passage attaches a figure and names nobody.
The signed paper is a fraction of the headline. Companies from both countries signed 29 memorandums of understanding and agreements worth more than EUR 9.356bn [7], about 23 percent of the EUR 40bn [17]. The UAE state news agency WAM said EUR 10bn of the package is pledged to Bavaria, covering industry, advanced technology, AI, data centres, digital infrastructure and energy security [8], a quarter of the total [19]. CNBC reported that the UAE has already invested about EUR 34bn in Germany, including in chemicals and renewable energy [11]. The new pledge is roughly 1.2 times that stock [18].
This was the first state visit to Germany by a UAE president; the visit ran from 9 to 11 September at the invitation of President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan met Chancellor Friedrich Merz [12]. "The UAE invests for the long term and builds partnerships that endure," said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the UAE's industry minister, according to AFP [13]. Thani Al Zeyoudi, the foreign trade minister, told Bloomberg TV in Berlin that the UAE is "very keen" to connect its economy, trade and investments with economic hubs around the world [14]. Non-oil trade between the two countries reached $15.5bn in 2025, up more than 14% on 2024 [15].
This text talks past the person who has to site a building. Both sides say they expect the package to strengthen industrial competitiveness, advance technological leadership and support long-term growth in Germany [22].
The sources document a sovereign pledge and a diplomatic instrument with no project attached to either. Whether a European team can plan around this comes down to who holds the grid connection agreement and whose balance sheet buys the transformers. The year power first flows separates a 2027 plan from a 2032 one. Until those are named, the firmest figure attached to the package is the EUR 9.356bn of company agreements already signed [7].
What to watch
- A named operator, site or grid connection agreement for the roughly 1 GW, none of which the declaration provides.
- The first meeting of the German-UAE Investment Council, and whether it attaches identified projects to the EUR 40bn.
- Whether the data embassy exploration produces an actual instrument on where German-hosted data sits and under whose law.