BERLIN, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- The digitization of almost all areas of life and business in Germany, further boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic, led to a surge in data center performance, the country's digital association Bitkom said Tuesday.
Capacities of data processing centers in Germany in terms of IT performance already increased by 84 percent from 2010 to 2020, and would continue to grow by another 30 percent by 2025, according to a study by Bitkom.
"Data centers and telecommunications networks are the backbone of digitization," said Bitkom Chief Executive Officer Bernhard Rohleder. "We can only drive forward the urgently needed digitization of the economy, education and administration with high-performance data centers."
The growth in data center capacity was primarily due to the increasing expansion of cloud computing, the study found. While cloud data center capacity increased by 150 percent between 2016 and 2021, traditional data centers were almost stagnating.
The annual energy demand of data centers and smaller IT installations in Germany increased from 10.5 to 16 billion kilowatt hours per year from 2010 to 2020 and accounted for 0.6 percent of the country's total electricity consumption, according to Bitkom.
Although capacities and energy demand were increasing, greenhouse gas emissions caused by data centers in Germany were falling since 2018. At around 6 million tons of CO2, emissions were roughly at the same level in 2020 as in 2010, the study found.
"Data center operators support the German government's goal of climate neutrality for all new data centers in Germany from 2027," Rohleder said. In order to achieve the target, sufficient electricity from renewable sources had to be made available. ■