Microsoft Germany (Elsdorf) data center, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Microsoft's planned data center in Elsdorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still waiting for its building permit, while permits have been granted for its two sister sites in Bedburg and Bergheim. All three are in the Rhenish mining area west of Cologne, a coal region facing an uncertain future as Germany exits coal, Heise reported in July 2026.

The town of Elsdorf agreed in 2025 to sell Microsoft two plots totaling about 26 hectares, one kilometer south of the village of Heppendorf, with a connection to the A4 motorway. The town council had already started the land use planning for a commercial area there in 2021, and Mayor Andreas Heller called the sale a major milestone for the small town.

The three sites are meant to back each other up, so that if one fails another can take over, and partial operation at Bedburg and Bergheim could start in 2028. Microsoft is investing 3.2 billion euros in the three projects, a sum that also covers expanding an existing Frankfurt site and training programs.

Microsoft broke ground for the cluster in Bergheim on March 12, 2026, with Elsdorf's mayor among the guests, and the state government presents it as the region's shift from coal to artificial intelligence. Microsoft says the data centers will use closed-loop cooling that needs almost no refilling once filled, and that it has secured replacement habitat for skylarks with the towns. The grid operator Westnetz is building a new substation in Bergheim to connect the data center there.

Critics online doubt the promised jobs because data centers run largely automated, point to high power demand, and note that host towns get little trade tax because companies with several sites split it, a German industry news site reported. Germany's national data center strategy, adopted in March 2026, calls for examining a rule that would give host towns a larger share of that tax, which still needs approval from the Bundestag, the federal parliament.

Elsdorf has not given its own jobs estimate, though several hundred jobs running the centers are expected at each of the other two sites. Kilian Vieth-Ditlmann of the group AlgorithmWatch told Heise that building ever more data centers as things stand endangers Germany's climate targets.

Microsoft plans a fourth site in the region, in Grevenbroich, where it has signed a purchase contract for about 23 hectares of farmland that is conditional on a building permit; it could run in the early 2030s.

The next step in Elsdorf is the building permit for the Heppendorf site; no decision date has been published.