An old business complex in the center of Munich, Germany, is being partially demolished. The buildings from the 1960s are being renovated to make way for offices and apartments. Four floors below ground, there was once a large bank data center. That's where Deutsche Telekom's new underground AI factory is now located. Built in just six months, the factory houses Germany's most modern computers for graphics design and artificial intelligence.
Many companies in Germany have been waiting for this for a long time. Because as the use of AI increases, more computing power is needed. Computing power can instantly do tasks that would have taken weeks to do before. This AI factory has increased Germany's computing power by about fifty percent. Its scope is so extensive. To see this technology, you have to go very deep underground. More than thirty meters. A long tunnel is the only way.
Inside are pods. Inside the pod are sixty-four servers that have five hundred and twelve high-performance graphics chips made by Nvidia. They are called GPUs. These are the most advanced technology in the world now. In an area of just eighty square meters, there is the computing power equivalent to a data center of one thousand square meters. There are fourteen such pods in total. For general industrial use, customers do not have to build their own data centers. So they can save a lot of costs.
The power consumption of a pod is about nine hundred kilowatts. That means that when running at full power, it is equivalent to charging about eighty electric cars at the same time. The inside of the pods is hot. The servers heat the air to forty to fifty degrees Celsius. This is a problem for any data center. But not for Telecom's AI factory. Because the location is suitable. The river runs right next to the old buildings.
The computers get very hot. But the water from the icepack fountain here helps to cool them. This means we are cooling with the help of nature and this data center runs entirely on renewable energy. Once the old buildings are fully renovated in a few months, the waste heat from the AI factory will be used to heat the apartments and offices.
