Germany news: Google plans data center in Hesse

Germany and California have agreed to deepen cooperation on climate action and renewable energy, according to the Environment Ministry.

The "Joint Statement on Climate and Energy Cooperation" between Baden-Württemberg and California was signed at the UN climate summit in Brazil.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and Jochen Flasbarth, Germany's environment state secretary, presided over the signing.

"California and Germany have been standing side by side for years when it comes to understanding climate protection as a necessary driver of innovation," Flasbarth said.

The partnership will focus on green technology, renewable energy, and strategies to adapt to climate change.

"Together, we want to show that progress, innovation, and climate protection go hand in hand," Flasbarth said. 

Newsom criticized US President Donald Trump's decision to reverse the US government's course on climate action.

"The United States of America is as dumb as we want to be on this topic, but the state of California is not. And so we are going to assert ourselves, we're going to lean in, and we are going to compete in this space," he said.

Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has criticized her own party members for agreeing to travel to Russia amid allegations of espionage and ties to the Kremlin.

Several AfD politicians plan to attend a symposium this week in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, a move that has drawn sharp backlash in Germany amid strained relations with Moscow.

"I cannot understand what they are actually supposed to do there, to put it bluntly," Weidel told reporters on Tuesday.

The trip comes as lawmakers from other parties, including the conservative head of Germany's intelligence oversight committee, accused AfD members of effectively spying for Russia by submitting extensive parliamentary inquiries on sensitive security topics.

The Sochi visit was repeatedly mentioned in a parliamentary debate over those allegations. A meeting with former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, a vocal supporter of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, had reportedly been planned but was later canceled on party orders.

Weidel, who has tried to position the AfD as a mainstream political force, defended its more conciliatory stance toward Moscow but said the trip offers "very little to be gained."

A major trial has begun in western Germany against ten defendants accused of running a human trafficking and prostitution network that brought women and transgender people from Thailand to Germany.

Prosecutors say the victims were forced to work in brothels to repay travel debts and were controlled through financial coercion. The defendants, aged between 29 and 64, face charges including organized human trafficking, forced prostitution, and money laundering.

According to investigators, the suspects held various roles in the network — from arranging travel and managing finances to transporting victims and running brothels, mainly in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Authorities said some of the profits were smuggled to Thailand in cash. In one case, €110,000 ($127,500) was flown from Hamburg Airport hidden inside packets of sweets.

Most defendants are Thai. Several hold European passports, including one German national. 

The Bielefeld Regional Court has set hearings through April 2026.

German police have uncovered a professional laboratory for synthetic drug production in the state of Lower Saxony and arrested several suspects in a joint operation with Dutch authorities, officials said Tuesday.

The illegal facility was discovered in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border and is believed to have been operated by a gang made up mostly of Dutch nationals.

Four suspects were provisionally detained in Germany, and another was arrested on an outstanding warrant. In the Netherlands, three additional suspects were detained under German warrants, police said.

During coordinated raids at eight sites in Lower Saxony and nine in the Netherlands, officers seized 130 liters (about 35 gallons) of an amphetamine precursor — equivalent to the total amount seized across Germany in all of 2024.

Investigators estimate the material could yield about 1.5 million doses with a street value in the tens of millions of euros. Specialized police units discovered the now-unused lab during the raids.

Authorities said the investigation has been underway since December 2024, involving close cooperation between German and Dutch police as well as Europol.

The multinational tech giant Google said on Tuesday that it plans to build a data center in Dietzbach, just south of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil joined the announcement.

The data center will be part of Google's wider investment in cloud infrastructure in Germany, which Reuters reported will also include projects using renewables and waste heat.

Overall, Google plans to invest a record-breaking €5.5 billion ($6.4 billion) in Germany by 2029, making this what Google has said will be its largest-ever investment in the country.

In a push to reduce the country's carbon footprint, German law requires that around two thirds of heat in newly installed heating systems must be derived from renewable sources or unavoidable waste heat.

Germany opened the doors to its very first Google data center in 2023. The center in Hanau, just east of Frankfurt am Main, will now reportedly be expanded as part of Google's investment scheme, as the regional German paper Hessenschau reported.  

Germany's chemical sector, which is widely seen as a barometer of the country's general economic health, is currently stagnant at a three-decade low, a group representing the chemical and pharmaceutical industries said on Tuesday.

The sector, which includes major German companies such as BASF and Bayer, is "struggling on all fronts," according to Wolfgang Grosse Entrup, head of the VCI association

"Production, sales, prices... everything is in the red," he told a press conference.

Grosse Entrup said chemical production was languishing around levels seen in 1995, with only some 70% of chemical plant capacity in use.

Quarterly sales to the US were down some 20% and those to Asia about 12% from the same period in the previous year, according to the VCI.

The pharmaceutical sector was in better shape, with production having risen from a year earlier, but unpredictable US tariff policy had led to diminished confidence there as well, the group said.

Grosse Entrup said the coalition government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, which took power in May on the back of promises to boost the ailing economy, had so far failed to "generate a spirit of optimism in industry."

"The economy is still stagnating. There is a lack of a convincing strategy that can restore confidence and get Germany back on track," he said.

The Saudi doctor standing trial over the Christmas market car attack in Magdeburg last year has confessed to the deed and described his feelings and motivation before the court.

He told the court that his dealings with German authorities and their lack of support for Saudi women had motivated him to carry out the attack, in which six people died and 338 were injured.

He said he had wanted to inform and warn the authorities, and had made criminal complaints that were not acted upon.

"There were only two paths to take," he said. "Either I leave Germany or I attack."

He said he had been "as cold as ice" on the day of the attack and had had the feeling that he was "doing something terrible."

"At the last moment, I saw there was no hope," he said, adding that he was sure the police would shoot him.

The 51-year-old accused was instead arrested just minutes after the attack on December 20, 2024, and has been in pre-trial detention since then.

Afghans living in Germany are concerned that representatives from the Taliban regime are now working in diplomatic posts in the country, the head of a project supporting single mothers from Afghanistan and their children has said.

Zohra Soori-Nurzad told public broadcaster WDR that the presence of representatives from the radical Islamist group at diplomatic missions, including the Afghan Consulate General in Bonn, was a "great risk and danger" to Afghans, some of whom have fled from the Taliban's oppressive measures, particularly against women.

She said Afghans might find it more difficult to apply for passports or advance their asylum proceedings.

According to Soori-Nurzad, who runs the aid project "Stitching for Life," it was also dangerous if members of the Taliban gained access to sensitive data, as this could be used against people coming from Afghanistan.

She said Afghans currently residing in Germany were for this reason "very frightened" to contact the consulate.

Soori-Nurzad also said it could not be ruled out that the Taliban regime would use the consulate for secret service activities.

The German Foreign Ministry told the epd news agency that although the Afghan diplomatic missions in Germany were led by people sent by the country before the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, the government had permitted two new staff to be sent by Kabul, one to Bonn and one to Berlin.

It said that the German government "had an interest in seeking that Afghan missions in Germany continue to be operative and that Afghan nationals in German receive adequate consular care."

This included the issuance of travel documents, it said.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan remains officially unrecognized by almost all countries around the world, including Germany, with Russia the only nation to have so far reinstated formal diplomatic ties.

Germany has, however, held talks "at a technical level" with the Taliban over issues such as deporting Afghans who have committed crimes

A German-Polish man has been arrested in the western German city of Dortmund on suspicion of having issued calls to attack politicians and offering rewards for doing so, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday.

They said the man, identified only as Martin S. under German privacy laws, also published instructions on the darknet for manufacturing explosives, while calling for donations in cryptocurrency that were to be used as rewards for carrying out such attacks.

The suspect, who prosecutors said was detained on Monday, is also alleged to have included a list with names and personal details of politicians and public figures on his platform, along with self-formulated death sentences.

The man, who has been accused of financing terrorism, instigating violence aimed at undermining the state and dangerous publication of personal details, is to come before the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe on Tuesday, the prosecutors said.

The court will decide on whether and how the man should be detained ahead of a likely trial.

Read more: Germany: Man arrested for darknet site targeting politicians

November 11 in Germany marks both the start of the boisterous Carnival season and the day on which the Catholic St. Martin and the legend about his sharing his cloak with a beggar are remembered with children's lantern parades.

Read more here:Carnival and St. Martin's Day: How two German feasts set on November 11 are connected

US-based artificial intelligence giant OpenAI lost a case in a Munich court over its use of German song lyrics under copyright. 

German national music rights association GEMA had brought the suit, arguing that the German ChatGPT large language model (LLM) had been partially trained on at least 100,000 stolen songs.

In the US, writers and musicians have decried their work being stolen to train ChatGPT, and accused OpenAI of deleting its datasets to obfuscate ts source material.

OpenAI is in the midst of a controversial deal with German software giant SAP to create a Germany-based AI data center.

While SAP claims it has been granted "full sovereignty" over the data, observers worry the process hasn't been made transparent enough to ensure that the US won't gain access to private German data.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz turns 70 on Tuesday, with a celebration planned by his Christian Democrats (CDU) in the late afternoon before the German leader marks the occasion with his wife, Charlotte, his children and grandchildren.

Merz himself has said he is not going to make a fuss about the occasion and that Tuesday will be a "normal working day."

"A great advantage of aging is that you become more philosophical and learn to tell what is important and what is not," he said.

He has also said that he is "grateful to be fit and healthy and to be able to concentrate completely on my task as chancellor."

Not everyone in Germany is of the opinion, however, that his age is not a hindrance, with 52% of respondents in a survey by the Forsa polling institute for private broadcaster RTL saying it would be better if he were younger.

The same poll showed a slump in his popularity, with just 18% saying they would welcome it if he ran for chancellor again in 2029.

This comes as the coalition government he leads, with the Social Democrats (SPD) as junior partner, comes under growing criticism amid infighting, rows over policy and its seeming failure to boost the ailing economy.

Merz is the first German chancellor to turn 70 in office since his CDU predecessor Konrad Adenauer, the first person to hold the position in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany.

Adenauer became chancellor at 73 in 1949 and remained in the post until 1963, when he was 87.

Taleb A.*, the Saudi-born doctor accused of the deadly attack on the Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg on December 20 last year, has announced that he wants to testify for "hours, perhaps days" as his trial enters its second day.

He has also said he intends to answer questions put to him by the Magdeburg regional court.

Taleb A. has already admitted to being the driver of the car that ran into passersby at a pedestrian crossing before slamming into crowds at the market, killing six people and injuring more than 300 more.

The 51-year-old has been charged on six counts of murder and 338 counts of attempted murder.

So far, the Christmas market in Magdeburg has not received permission to take place amid criticisms of its security concept.

However, city officials hope that it can go ahead from November 20 as planned after improvements have been made.

*DW follows German privacy laws by not giving full names of suspects in order to prevent potential harm to their reputations.  

Guten Tag to all our readers from the DW newsroom on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn.

Among other things, we will be following the trial of the man accused of the Christmas market car attack in Magdeburg last year.

The accused is expected to testify on what is the second day of proceedings on Tuesday.

The trial is one of the largest of its kind in postwar Germany and is expected to run over some 50 days until at least March 12, 2026.

Meanwhile, we wish Chancellor Friedrich Merz all the best for his 70th birthday today!

The German leader has said it will be a "normal working day" for him, but his Christian Democrats are nonetheless planning a reception with 300 guests to celebrate the day.

We invite you to read on to find out about the top talking points in Germany on Tuesday, November 11.