Green plans Swiss data center campus on former ABB land

Green plans to build a data center campus in Birr, in the canton of Aargau, on a 250,000 sqm brownfield site previously owned by ABB, the Swiss developer said.

Green said the site, known as Grossacher and Grändel, will be built in phases. It did not release the facility's projected compute power or its cost; a spokesperson told Data Center Dynamics that the firm could not provide those estimates because the project remains in the planning phase.

For investors in the data center, the undisclosed compute capacity and capital cost leave the project's return and funding plan open. Waste heat revenue depends on whether nearby district heating operators contract for it, and phasing depends on whether Green signs an anchor tenant before building speculatively.

The design Green described puts the servers alongside industrial and commercial buildings and parkland open to the public. Heat from the servers is intended to be drawn off into nearby district heating networks, and Green said the computing infrastructure is likely to use a closed-loop cooling system that minimizes annual water consumption.

Green was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Lupfig, in the same canton, where it runs three of the seven data centers it operates in Switzerland, according to its website. In September 2025 it set up a German subsidiary, Green Datacenter Germany GmbH, and began assessing several sites outside Frankfurt.

"Together with the municipality and the canton, we want to develop the site for the future and create added value for the region," Roger Süess, Green's chief executive, said in a statement. Green also said the campus would strengthen Switzerland's digital sovereignty and make high-performance compute more accessible to the country's businesses and public organizations.

The site is secured and the planning conversation with the municipality and canton is the next step Green has named.