Germany's Bavarian State Parliament has approved funding for the expansion of the North Bavarian High-Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU) at the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg.

The new data center will be located in the south of Erlangen, a city in Bavaria where FAU has a campus.

The government will invest more than €270 million ($283m) into the project and expand the capacity available to northern Bavarian universities to 10MW.

In a statement, Minister Markus Blume said the new data center will support the “rapid development of AI,” adding that “massive expansion of the computing infrastructure represents a decisive leap not only for FAU, but for the entire region.”

The NHR@FAU was established in 2021 by the Joint Conference of Science Ministers to form a national network of eight high-performance computing centers throughout Germany. Under the terms of the agreement, the federal and state governments pledged to fund the hardware, operating costs, and personnel costs of the network partners for an initial period of ten years.

NHR@FAU currently houses three supercomputers, including Alex and Fritz, which were ranked 252 and 283 respectively on the most recent edition of the Top500 list.

Additionally, the center’s 16.94 petaflops Helma cluster ranked 79 on the list. Installed in November 2024, Helma is comprised of 384 Nvidia H100 GPUs, with 200 of those GPUs available for researchers in Bavaria via the state’s BayernKI program.

"The new building is a key building block for establishing a beacon for the region with international appeal,” said Professor Gerhard Wellein from NHR@FAU in a Google-translated statement. “To bring together artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and data in a synergistic way and provide the latest IT services in these fields we need both: A modern working environment for the brightest minds and energy-efficient infrastructures for IT systems of the highest performance class."