Construction of €260 million computing centre in Germany gets green light

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The German government has given the go-ahead to a planning application for a new €260 million computing centre in Bavaria, with construction to start soon.

Science minister Markus Blume approved the plan for the North Bavarian High-Performance Computing Centre.

The new facility at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) will be a partner to the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching.

It also means that the Free State of Bavaria has already invested more than €1.5 billion on new construction projects at FAU since 2019.

Blume said, “This milestone project will propel FAU into the first division – in terms of computer infrastructure and investments. This new high-performance computing center means we will have a second center in Bavaria in addition to the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching. It will enable us to advance to completely new dimensions in data processing.”

FAU president Prof. Dr. Joachim Hornegger added, “Top-level research is increasingly reliant on processing immense volumes of data at extremely high speeds and this is by no means limited to engineering, as it is also required everywhere where artificial intelligence is being used – whether in medicine, geosciences or humanities.

“The new high-performance computing center will significantly improve research performance throughout Northern Bavaria. Once again, we will be able to demonstrate that excellent research requires powerful infrastructure that can hold its own on an international level.”