Hetzner Online — Falkenstein GPU Cloud Campus (Germany)

Hetzner Online is Germany's largest independent cloud and dedicated server provider, operating two primary campuses in Germany: Falkenstein (Vogtland, Saxony) and Nuremberg (Bavaria). The company is known for aggressive price-to-performance ratios that have made it the default infrastructure choice for European developers, startups, and research institutions.

The Falkenstein campus, opened in 2009 and expanded continuously since, is Hetzner's largest facility. It anchors the company's GPU cloud expansion, which launched in 2023–2024 with NVIDIA H100 SXM5 GPU nodes offered through its Cloud and Dedicated Server products.

**GPU cloud expansion**: Hetzner's GPU offering targets the AI inference and training market directly. The GX2-120 and AX162-R server lines offer NVIDIA H100 NVL GPUs with high memory bandwidth, positioned for large language model inference, fine-tuning, and AI batch workloads. The company markets these to developers who need H100 access at lower cost than hyperscalers, with single-node and small-cluster configurations popular among European AI startups and academic groups.

**Renewable energy**: Hetzner has operated on 100% certified renewable electricity since 2017, sourcing from wind and hydro through RECS certificates. This positions its GPU cloud as a low-carbon compute option for organizations tracking AI infrastructure emissions.

**Pricing and accessibility**: Hetzner's GPU servers are priced significantly below AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud equivalents for comparable hardware, reflecting the company's owned-infrastructure model and European operating costs. This has driven notable adoption among budget-conscious AI workloads: LLM hosting, diffusion model inference, and research-scale training runs.

The Nuremberg (NBG) campus also hosts GPU capacity, but Falkenstein is the primary expansion site for AI infrastructure given its larger land footprint and existing high-density power infrastructure.