The Opel site, before I start with all the other things which I have prepared for you. When we bought the Opel site back in 2022, I think. Yeah, in 2022, the end of 2022. It was not an easy market. We bought the site for a reasonable price, and we negotiated with Opel that we would have exclusivity on a data center development for the whole site. Whatever, there are still big parts of the Opel site which we did not buy because they are deemed to be developed for other purposes than what we normally do. We did not touch upon that one. There were also some parts which had big heritage conservation problems as we see it. We bought what we think is the real industrial heart of the company out. By the way, Opel is still producing cars right next to us.
They just have got the Astra. They make a new Astra. Yesterday we had what the Germans call the Richtfest. Our roof building is ready. The thing is still hanging there. We had also more than 100 people here yesterday. I also had a speech here yesterday, and Opel has got a lot of plans, new developments with Leapmotor, which they own in China. I am a very big believer in the reindustrialization of Europe. That is also why we are standing here. Now, for this building, we have done really very much our best to make it very green. We have all kinds of features built in this building. It does not look like it because it looks like concrete, but we have the Unidome system inside. Thanks to that, we saved 155 tons of concrete, more than 100 truckloads.
In total, we saved more than 1,500 tons of CO2 in this building. Thanks also to a lot of recycled materials. I think, okay, we are aiming for a DGNB gold certification. We are actually aiming for a platinum, and we are fairly convinced that we are going to get it. But gold is. I said gold because gold is probably the only medal you can win by using concrete. When we did this transaction with Opel, we are also.
You can see on the banners behind. Afterwards, I am going to show on the next thing, a little bit, a little video. We are also going to build their new engineering and design building, which is coming right in front of us here, where they are going to do really R&D things for the next future. More than 8,000 people are going to work here on this site.
We assigned a 22-year lease agreement with them. We have got a mother company guarantee from Stellantis for EUR 300 million. We have really tried our best to make this a very institutional product which fits very well within the VGP thing. The gift which came with it is these brownfield sites, and we have many of them. They come with a couple of very big advantages. You have very good schooled people, technical people. For future production purposes, it is ideal. You also have got very big connections to infrastructure. This site has a 112 MW connection today. 7 hectares of our land is now reserved for Amprion, for a new division plant, which they are permitting now, which is going to come in the future. From which we have reserved another 140 MW coming on in a couple of years' time.
It will take probably longer than what they promised because it always takes longer, but we are prepared to it. There is a power plant on this site which you have seen. That power plant makes now heat. We have a project together with KIO, the operator of that power plant, to turn it over into gas turbines, then we can almost unlimited because there is a huge gas connection. We can go and bridge our way to grid connection through the gas plant, we can scale up our data center plans right next to it. I am very weary to talk about data centers because nowadays everybody feels like he is the new data center specialist. I am definitely not, but I will explain you a little bit the way forward and what we are doing.
On the agenda today, I am sorry, my people told me I have two hours to talk to you. So by the time you fall asleep, I will probably stop, but not earlier. We have, unlike our reporting cycle, which is what you are all looking at every half year or every quarter of a year, you are looking at which numbers have we prepared. Inside of VGP, we are a family company. We have a very long-term vision and a very long-term strategy. In that very long-term strategy, we have been preparing ourselves for what we think the market is going to do. The first thing which we did or what we are doing over the last years is I have almost 500 employees at VGP. Germany is my biggest market, we have been trying to hire as much as possible real good engineering people.
We built all of our buildings, also this one where you are at the moment sitting in, hopefully it does not fall down, but we are building it all ourselves. So this does not mean we have blue-collar people, but we have the capability to just divide, to engineer the whole thing, to divide the whole thing up in all of its components, then to orchestrate the whole construction site of it. We have done that for Zalando, you have seen how beloved we were in Zalando. I think you had a. We always. You will see they have made videos with us, et cetera. We have that with all of our customers. We try really to be a one-stop shop for them and to prepare for it. We see that our market is changing. We have, of course, a lot of standard buildings.
I am not sorry to say that it is the bulk. The bulk is the standard buildings, but we see more and more automatization, robotization, we think that is going to accelerate with AI. There it is a lot easier to build the building around the system. So the buildings of the future, they must be really modern. They must have very modern features. For that, we have been preparing a lot, that is we think that demand is changing. At the moment, we are working on a lot of new deals, which are buildings Zalando type, what you have seen today. We have a new phase of development growth. You know that we buy all of our land plots subject to having the right permit. This means we only pay for it when we have a permit, which gives us the certainty that we can construct on it.
This doesn't, however, mean that we can construct immediately on the bulk of our sites, yes, but many of the sites are brownfields like this. We first need to demolish, we need to decontaminate, we need to do some other things around it, build new infrastructure. At this moment in time, a bit like in 2020 or 2019, when Zalando came online, when Munich came online, which were our projects at that time, really big. Development comes in waves, and we are at the point where now we really have a very big, and they call it cohort. Nowadays, they use the Roman titles from before. I feel like if I'm going to war, but it isn't. We have really a lot of landmarks, sites, and I will show and introduce some of them to you because you cannot reproduce them. You can't multiply them.
A site like Rüsselsheim is very unique, so close to Frankfurt Airport with all this connection, all electricity. It's something to never give away anymore if we can. We have been working also over the last five years, and that's been with a shock. It came with a shock in 2022 when the war in Ukraine started and our biggest joint venture partner, Allianz, with whom we still have a very good relationship, by the way. They said, "Yes, but we have a problem. We can't invest any more in real estate because we have already too much on our balance sheet." We started to think, how should we mitigate this? Because it's really our system. We grow very fast, and you know the numbers. We really grow very fast. We're going to grow fast this year also.
By recycling through joint venture transactions, we were also always able to recycle that capital in the next investment phase and in the land bank, which made sense. We've tried to move away a little bit from dependency on single players, and we want to become more like, I don't want to take the words in my mouth, but like a diversified investment thing where we sell our assets, or we bring our assets inside of a vehicle where there is multiple investors inside. We're online. We're lining that up a little bit like as if it was a fund. That's where we are working at at the moment. We have several work streams. I have told you about them in our results call, and that's ongoing, and I think that's the third thing.
We need this to be able to fund all of the growth which we have in front of us, and we think that we are very close to be able to say, "All is organized. We can go forward." That's the new inflection point. How do we convert growth into earnings? We are in the first place a developer. The developer it's not linear, but we have 4.3 million sq uare meters of just the ground floor embedded in our land bank. On top of that comes mezzanines, what you have seen today in Zalando, mezzanines, office extra, et cetera. So it's probably more like 5 million square meters . But that is the footprint embedded in the land bank of what we can still develop on land which we already own today.
On the investment side, it is our contracted rental income, and everybody always looks at us as this weird animal, but we are a developer, and underneath of it, we are feeding, you could call it a REIT-like type of thing, and we like very much the recurrent income because it gives us a stable basis if things do not go as fast as we think or things go a little bit different than we think, we still can rely on our contracted rental growth, and it is scaling very quickly. It is going up very quickly. Then we have a third leg to stand on, and that is our renewable energy. We have solar now really at scale.
Over the first six months, we had EUR 7.6 million of gross income from the renewable energy, and it is growing very fast, and we are now investing big time in battery storage, especially here in Germany, but also in other countries. We have a lot of projects ongoing. They are very high yielding. Of course, batteries do not have a very long lifetime, so it is also you need to take a look at it. But as far as on paper, it looks fantastic. But we will see, and we have now all of our projects are coming online. Then there is a third thing I would like to take you through, and that is the data centers. Now, we are not a data center developer. We are not a specialist in data centers.
We just happen to have land plots we have invested in in the past, which are extremely well fit to develop a data center on. I wanted to find somebody we can partner with, which has all the other things. People who have experience, people who have renown, people who have already built, because many of these data center specialists, when I actually started talking to them, and everybody run through my door because everybody wanted to have Rüsselsheim, 95% of them never, ever built a real data center. They just knew a lot about it. So we have signed an MOU with a very reputable party, and they are developing data centers on a big scale. They have customers. They have hyperscalers. They have done all the mistakes in the past and corrected them.
They know what to do, what not to do, and we are going to make a 50/50 joint venture with them through which we can, because it is a very big ticket. Also, if we do all these things, we can dilute over time and take other investors inside as we near completion or as it is completed, so that we have a more flexible way of holding onto these assets. By not having a 50% share like we have in everything else necessarily. It is our ambition, but we will see how it goes. So that is, we have identified our first opportunities, and now we are partnering for scale. First on the growth inflection point. So we see that demand is changing what the tenants need.
I wanted to show you Zalando today because it is a very fine example of how the world is changing and how everything they try to automize, and it goes a lot faster than with human hands. The output of these warehouses are incredible. When Amazon put out its robotic center in Frankenthal, and we looked at the output which they had inside of that building, packages per hour, and we looked at the same size of building, which a big German retailer had built without this automation, well, it was 10 x more. So they could do 10x more packages an hour send out, both e-commerce, just by doing the robotics and the thing. So we think that that is the way forward. These investments are huge.
What you have seen today in Zalando is an investment which makes it impossible for them to leave, only if they go bankrupt, which I do not believe, but I think it is a very good group. So for us, it is also important to do these very big things with the absolute security and with very good companies, which we know that we are in safe hands and that they have a very solid business plan.
We see that in our. Location is, for me, always everything. It has always been everything. And we have now a couple of locations. We have many locations where we are negotiating these type of things on. Big investments, very nice long-term leases, all 15 or 20 or 25 years, which we are going to deploy. And those sites, I named a couple of them, but Rüsselsheim, you have seen here. Hagen is not far away.
It is in the Ruhrgebiet. There we bought a paper mill. Also, huge amount of electrical power available. We are now negotiating two very big lease agreements there. But we have Verona coming online after eight years. We have La Naval coming online this year. Vélizy, we have signed our first lease agreement. It is 13 km away from the Eiffel Tower, right next to the Castle of Versailles. We have Nürnberg, which is a beautiful site, which was a Siemens office campus. It is right next on the city ring.
In Bayern, there is nothing. It is impossible to develop something. We bought it five, six years ago. We had all the time rental income from Siemens. They are now going out, and we are in very advanced negotiations for a tenant who will take the whole site. We went with him to the city council because that is also something which is very difficult.
When you come and want to buy Rüsselsheim, the city council, they say, "Yeah, but we do not want only data centers there," or, "We do not want only logistics there. We want you to commit to this and this and this and this," which we can do and which we do, and which we promised, and we have a very good track record in it.
That is why we have been able to buy all these sites also, where we have Reggio Emilia, we have Vila Nova de Gaia, it is Porto. Years of land assembly, and it is not like we go from six months to six months. All of that sits in our balance sheets at acquisition cost. I bought Rüsselsheim for EUR 75 million, 70 hectares, Frankfurt, just so you know. That is where we were. VGP's capital platform is broadening. I already explained that.
We have EUR 3.6 billion of gross asset value that can be transacted. Since 2022, we transacted an enormous amount of money. We recycled EUR 2.2 billion, which we reinvested mostly in our pipeline. You know how much dividend we pay, so all the rest goes in the pipeline and pay back our debt. Neither the land bank nor the capital recycling is really new. It is just the phase where we are on that is different. We are prepared for a big leap.
Hence, also, I wanted to give you an update. You are all, I assume, most of you, investors inside of VGP, so that you know at which point we are standing. I am going to go through a little bit the secular tailwinds. Now, you will never believe it. You saw it at Zalando. Robotics has taken over. It is going so much faster.
It is really getting into scale today, where when I started back in 2002 with building the first logistic warehouses, the specifications were roughly the same, but now the load-bearing capacity of the floors has gone up tremendously. The flatness of the floor has gone up tremendously. The installations have gone up tremendously. The legislation around green and everything with it. We have solar panels on all the roofs. Most of the thing is green roof now, but now it also needs to be able to really have these robotic systems inside. And we have them in many, many places already. Oops. Our thing fell out. We have them in many, many places already. But what really surprised me is we did a little study on how much robotics we have actually in Europe.
By 10,000 manufacturing employees, Western Europe is the most robotized space in the world, more than the Chinese. Of course, the Chinese, they have 2 million robots running around, but by number of people which are working in the warehouse, we are the most robotized. Now, yesterday I had a very interesting discussion with the CEO of Opel. And there are two people of Opel here today. They are standing there. If you have asked questions for them, you can attack them later on. But he told me about leap industries, and we asked him, "Why do you have these dark factories in China?" He said, "Well, one of the big problems in China, it is actually different than we think.
People are getting very quick, a lot older, and the young people, they do not want to work in the factories anymore." So they have really problem in hiring people there despite the whole cohort. So they need to go more and more in automation. Everybody has its own drivers. For us, it is really we want to be prepared for it, and you see the countries where there is a lot of automation in Europe, in most of those countries, VGP is very active today. It is raising the specification of the building. You have clearly seen that it is a bit special. The generic shell is for racking and forklifts, but we do now more and more a purpose-built envelope. And that is really built to suit, it is true.
We see that these buildings are very versatile, and they can easily be used in a traditional way, then they can easily be transferred into another robotic system. The economics are enormous. It really dwarfed the shell, what Zalando did. Also the same with Amazon in Frankenthal, when we built the robotics. The intralogistic things which are inside are a lot more expensive, a lot bigger investment than our building. The location is so important for them because it is from here out, it is so easy to transport to everywhere. It is so central in Germany. So it is really things which we should look at.
Going forward, that is where we think our new demand will come from in the first place. We see a lot of retrofits happen, but only into modern stock. The older buildings, most of them, they do not have the right height. They do not have the right floor. You cannot put any of the MEP necessary on the roof. You have seen in Zalando, everything there is fresh air everywhere. It is cooled. There is a lot of technique around it. You need to be able to put it somewhere. So it needs to be modern buildings. We think that is going to drive our growth going forward. Automation and robotics are one thing.
Defense, you all know how it looks like in today's world. Defense was completely taboo a couple of years ago for us. We would never do a defense player. That has changed. That has changed quite a lot. 1.5% of the GDP. NATO wants to invest 5% of the GDP into defense, but of those 5%, 1.5% is into infrastructure, hence buildings. We see a lot.
We have a lot of tenants already which are doing. We have the Bundeswehr, the German Army, twice in our buildings in Magdeburg and in Koblenz. We are building for GE, which is doing defense systems in Bucharest. We have Magna Steyr, which is making vehicles in Austria, army vehicles in our buildings. We have Israel Aerospace, which is a dual purpose. It is our answer to Elon Musk's SpaceX. We are building their new factory. Actually, we delivered it today to them in Munich. They are backed by NATO. NATO took a big investment inside. They put through their funds a big investment inside. There is others, which we are negotiating with. So that has become something which is also driving growth inside of our thing. We have the supply chain restructuring. Everybody is questioning me about the German market.
Yeah, the car industry, and how is that going to go? We have in Germany a lot of demand, actually, from Chinese companies who are quickly taking over if we are not careful. The German spirit is not dead. These people are really very inventive, and they want to go ahead. They are very lean and mean if they want to. I am a big believer in this. Actually, it is still our biggest growth motor. Despite all the other big countries where we are in, Germany is for us still the biggest growth motor. Supply chain restructuring, we have 10 groups, EUR 48 million of rent or 10% of our total contracted rental income, a little bit less with CATL, for which we have built here a huge factory. Hyundai Mobis, we build in Pamplona, the new factory to produce batteries for the car industry.
KraussMaffei , it's a Chinese company. They're making plastic molding machinery, huge investment. We have Fuyao, we have Lear. We have a lot of others still in the place. In total, in advanced manufacturing, it's 30% of our total income. It's a very strong argument to do this because they are very long-term tenants, and it seduces the local authorities because they bring employment, they bring renewal, they bring new investments inside of the town. They attract people. We have EUR 150 million across 96 tenant groups in 13 countries which are related to production. It's a very big growth group. Then lately, we see e-commerce. During the years where there was a pandemic, they had taken up too much space. That's consumed now, and we see all of them now where we have a lot of demand from e-commerce again.
In Europe, the e-commerce and distribution represents about 19% of the total trade volume, 19.5%. We have 19% of VGP's rent. But if you look at the U.K. and the U.S., where the penetration of e-commerce is a lot higher, it also says, in my opinion, a little bit about where it's going to go through in the next years. We see it growing a lot at the moment. I have some pictures to convince you, but I think you are convinced after seeing Zalando this morning. We have KraussMaffei in Munich. It's full of robotics. We have BMW, their R&D facility, they have more than 100 KUKA robots inside. Zalando is fully automated. We have Active Ants, but we also have Parc, Notino, Inter Cars. All of them have robotics inside, and all of them are very much dependent on it.
Our land bank, why we can capture that demand, we have very big land bank. All top locations, I would say. We try to really buy the top locations. What is under construction is not so important, just that it's 76% pre-let, but we have also a lot of electrical power, and we, in Germany, have also the license to sell energy. In Germany, if you want to sell energy, you need a special license. You just can't go and sell energy. We have a license. We can buy and sell energy, and we do that. We trade in green energy. All of our customers, they become green energy from us, which we deliver them. We buy it in, we sell it through to them. They take. That is how it goes.
Most of it, of course, we buy in from ourself and from our own generated energy on our rooftops. If we can't deliver it, we are now going to store it in batteries and then release it in the grid. We can play with it. That's what we are going to do. Then what's more important, what I already said, it's our in-house capabilities. We are very much involved in permitting. We are very much involved in trying to optimize all of our constructions together with Opel, for example. We had many sessions about how to create these buildings so that it's really green. We have a lot of technical design capabilities. We do ourselves the procurements. We have a very good feel in every market for how much something can cost. With AI, you can even play with that a little bit more.
There is a lot of opportunities coming for us. We do ourselves the construction, and we keep long-term ownership. I am an absolute convinced person that we need to keep on doing that. We need to sell sometimes maybe to refresh a couple of these things inside of our portfolios. The biggest, the iconic locations, I am an absolute believer you cannot just buy them back in the market. If you sell them, they are lost forever, and they belong to somebody else. There is so many properties inside of our portfolio which are leased 10 years ago, and the lease just keeps on going, and meanwhile, the lease level has gone up tremendously. There is a lot of hidden value in that also when it comes to renewal. I have some more examples. BMW, it is really worthwhile.
If you look on YouTube and you ask for the Parsdorf facility, there is a lot of videos about their battery development capabilities. It is really very impressive. Amazon, we have them in five parks now. We are negotiating with them on a whole bunch of new lease agreements. The next time we do a Capital Markets Day, I will try to get you inside of Frankenthal in the robotic center, because you have 3,000 robots running around on three different levels, screwing themselves up under pallets and then driving around with the pallets everywhere.
It has really been a nightmare to do that, but it is a very nice investment. Inter Cars, you can see it here. All of these things are just fully automized. It is an ecotech system. It is huge. It is 60,000 sq m, and it is in Bucharest of all places. It is really very modern.
It is aerospace, I already told you about. Hyundai, I told you about. We have a lot of these conveyor-driven last mile things, which is DPD and DHL, which in Lisbon both have their headquarters on the same plot, which is very funny. The two biggest competitors sit on the same plot, both owned by us, right next to each other. I am curious how they do it with their employees. That is the demand side. Now I am coming to the ingredient side, why we would be able to capture this demand. In my head, it is technical competence, but in the first place, real estate is and remains everything is about location, location, and the technical features.
That is why our magazine is called "Location to the Third." I am going to show you some land positions which we have just now really mature, and which we think is fantastic, and on all of them, we have current ongoing lease negotiations. You are here, Rüsselsheim, Frankfurt. Bought it from Stellantis. Besides what we are constructing here, which is 10 hectares, we can still develop at least 230,000 sq m, and that is without the data center. That is just what we are going to do without a data center. Data center is not computed inside of any of this thing. I left it on purpose out. Vélizy in Paris. We have signed our first lease agreement. It is completely demolished. It was a very big R&D site. It is really very close. Hagen, Dortmund, we are demolishing it now.
We are signing our first big lease agreement in two or three weeks. We are finalizing it. It is a very big one. We are negotiating the second one, and these two lease agreements will take the whole site. It will be signed by the end of the year for both, we think. La Naval, Bilbao, we are just now having had a bit of troubles in getting the final building permits. We just started with the infrastructure. Odense is coming online next year. It is in Denmark.
Also in Denmark, we have Greve North, for which we also have a tenant for the whole park, which is right at the entrance of Copenhagen. The location is just stunning. It is really fantastic. We have Nürnberg , I already talked to you about. Anyway, we have so many. These are just the examples which are, for me, the most iconic and now the freshest.
We have a land bank of 10.4 million square meters, so there is construction ongoing on a lot of other places also. This is really, I think, where the future value of VGP sits in its land bank, which again, I want to repeat it once more, stands in our book at its acquisition value. We do not at its present value, I would say, because its acquisition value plus what we have invested inside of infrastructure and permitting, et cetera, which changes a bit.
As I said, these land plots, they are positions that will be very difficult to recreate today. If you want to buy it, we have bought this one very good, and you need to be a bit lucky also when buying this. The market today is a bit more favorable towards people with capital, that is true, because it is not so easy.
I am so convinced about this land plot and everybody seems to be. It is not only that, Vélizy , La Naval, and Nürnberg, I just wanted to show once. I do not think it is so easy to compete on these land plots with us. If we are here, there is nobody around us here in Frankfurt, if there is a big demand, which is Frankfurt related, who can say, "Yeah, I can deliver it also." It is difficult. There is no vacancy in these top markets. That scarcity is turning. It is a very big advantage commercially. From acquisition and permitting to tenant engagement, we can pull out of the drawer a permit and say, "We will adapt it for you. We can start construction." We are working on it. We have our permit in Verona.
Also to give you an idea of how we work with risks inside of a land acquisition thing, because many people buy land, and then they have to go through. Especially with the brownfields, you need to be very careful because you need to have, in the first place, an agreement, sort of formal, with the local authority, because they can just stop you, whatever, if they are not convinced about what you are going to do. That is very important. Verona, I signed when we started in Italy in 2018, and the payment was conditioned to having the building permits and the infrastructure built, which is going to be the end of this year. So all these years we have had it, all these years the price was fixed.
There is no indexation, and we are now buying it at the price of 2018, EUR 50 per square meter, including infrastructure. I think it's a very nice one. There are a lot of examples like that. In the tenant engagement, as we said, Vélizy , Hagen, Nürnberg, Reggio Emilia. Reggio Emilia, we already signed our first lease agreements. There is a lot of demand. We are starting construction now here in Rüsselsheim, what you can see, and La Naval. Infrastructure has started, and we refurbished the first two buildings, and we are going to build the new ones. It's moving together. It's well-faced because we think we are going to be able now to do all these closings with our new. Which will release a lot of capital. Closings with our new system of East Capital. Closings with our new thing with Areim.
By the way, the people from East Capital are also here. They're sitting there in the back. If you have a nasty question for them, you can. It has become executable at once. That's what we are really convinced about. I'm first going to drink. I'm sorry. Unfortunately, only water. Our joint venture system until now was one partner takes it all in a certain region. It's very difficult to work with two partners take it all in a certain region, because then you are getting conflicts on, "Yes, but I want that thing, not him. That is not okay. I want that thing." That is the discussions we've been having in the past. Going forward, we have now tried to line up two new platforms, one which is focused more on Eastern European things, but also with some Western European exposure to it.
It's a mix over the thing. One which is more Western European, but some exposure. We have 140 parks, and we have divided them up into exclusivities, which we've given to each of them. So everybody knows. It's not going to be one investor, but both vehicles are going to be a multiple investor vehicle, which is expandable, and it's quite sizable what we want to do. So we want to really go from transactions to a real capital platform. If you want to, I hate to say it, but it's a little bit, we don't reinvent the warm water. It's a little bit towards what Prologis has been doing in the past. We need to do a little bit the same, I think, because our growth is so big that we are going to converge like that.
By the way, what a nice transaction they did with SEGRO. I hate it because it's the Americans buying us again, and I would have loved to see David doing something else. It's a good indication of how people think about us and about our valuations also. I'm not so sure about this slide. The numbers say always everything.
The sentiment is a bit difficult at the moment, I think. What is true is that in the first half and more in the second quarter than the first quarter, the investment activity in direct investments in logistics and in industrial has been taken up, and it's quite a bit higher than it has been even before the pandemics. During 2021 and 2022, of course, there was a lot, but in the first half year, EUR 18.8 billion of transactions happened in the European market, and that is huge.
That has been good. A 13% year-on-year, and it is already the second year that the first half also increases. There is appetite. We will see if the appetite fluctuates with how Trump goes with his epic fury, but let us hope it just stops at some point. What we are very convinced of is that this recycling model, which we have created back in 2016, works very well. We have done, since 2022, EUR 3.5 billion of closings. We have recycled out of that EUR 2.2 billion, which we have all reinvested inside of the land bank. I always see myself as a farmer. A farmer first needs to do the land preparation, then needs to seed these crops, and then the harvest comes at the end.
Well, I think we are now in the middle of it is all growing, and it is getting ready to be harvested. Until now, it was in individual vessels, the things which we have now a lot of assets standing in our balance sheet, which we can transact. We also are ready for that. The next phase is to really do, as I already said, multiple scalable investment vehicles, which we are working on in a very high tempo at the moment. It enables us to recycle faster, to broaden our investor base, which is something which we have learned in 2022. It is not good to be dependent on one person. You need to think and the economics are retained. Our asset management fee grows a lot. You will see later on. Our recurrent income base grows a lot. It is our fastest-growing at the moment.
It is a broader ecosystem of investment vehicles, something like, as I said, and I do not want to compare myself to anybody else, but it is more skewed towards what, for example, Prologis has been doing. This is where we stand, and now how do we convert growth, because we are going to grow a lot into earnings. On the call, which we did, Peter made a graph about our development yields and about where we on average are yield on cost, and our yield on cost is including everything. It is the land development cost. It is our own team which invested inside. It is capitalized interest. It is the whole construction cost. It is the financing cost. It is everything. On average, we are developing at 8.7% yield. Then it goes from 6.2%, the lowest, to over 11%, the highest.
That is depending on in which jurisdiction we are and which clients we have, but we feel that we are in a very good place there. We have a healthy margin. If you look at it, we have a 30% on average margin towards where the valuations are today. Our recurrent earnings base is growing. The property development, that is what we really are. We like to create new things. I like to do. I like to think about all new things all the time. I need to have a lot of great people around me to stop me from being too wild in my imagination. But that is what we like to do, developing new things. But that is very cyclical. We have land, and suddenly it comes all together, and then it is like Munich in 2021.
We had a huge profit out of our developments, but that is cyclical. The other one, the recurrent income, that is linear. It is growing all the time underneath. That is why it is becoming more and more important. The recurrent income is recurring. We have EUR 134.8 million EBITDA in the first half year, and this year it was 72% of the group EBITDA. So it is a good mattress, a good cushion to sleep on, and then the rest is extra income.
This I already said. The rented is already contracted. We have EUR 69 million on our current projects under construction signed, so they are all coming to maturity. This building will be delivered in the, I think we will be ready by May next year, but we will deliver it in August, so it will start generating rental income from August on next year.
All the others which are here, which we have driven through, is also, by the way, generating rental income. It is a sale and lease back to Opel, and it goes until when we start demolishing. Then the renewable energy, that is committed projects, and they are already funded. On the property development side, so on our developments, this is what I already said. We own 10.4 million land bank. It is a big land bank.
We can construct probably 5 million square meters on it. 4.3 million is the footprint. The capital expenditure, but that is a very theoretical number because it depends very much on which type of buildings we are going to do on it, is roughly EUR 2.7 billion for also theoretical rental value of EUR 311 million, which we can still contract on this land bank. That is with average rental prices of today.
That is with average what we have in the portfolio. So taking into account whether we are going to go towards more Zalando buildings or toward more standard buildings. It is not taking into account one single data center, which is a total different economic. I will come to it later. That is something completely different. So we have so far deployed between EUR 500 million -EUR 750 million a year. How it is funded? Well, it is mostly funded through our cash recycling model. 2027, 2028, and 2029 are going to be, if all goes well, harvest years for us. That is the years when we are going to offload a lot of things from our balance sheet into our joint ventures and going to start up a lot of new pre-let pre-let new things, mainly pre-let new things on our land bank.
As I said, the EUR 311 million, it is embedded in the land bank, but that is a very theoretical number. If we take on average that what we develop a year, then we could say we have a land bank for the coming four to five years. But a land bank is something which you need to keep nurturing all the time and to keep investing in all the time because not all countries grow at the same speed, not all the regions grow at the same speed, and you need to be able to just react flexible with where you are and what you do. The second section is our income-generating assets. Our income-generating assets are EUR 420 million is generating cash today. So let us say, EUR 35 million a month of rental income comes in.
Then EUR 37.9 million of rental income starts paying rent in the next 12 months. They have signed, it is under construction. We are going to deliver. They start paying when we deliver. Then there is a EUR 297 million potential out of the little vacancy which we have and the pipeline to let, which then the total rental potential goes up to EUR 800 million.
By the way, we have crossed the EUR 500 million line today. VGP has more than EUR 500 million of rental income, including its joint ventures at 100%. EUR 500 million of rental income on the yearly basis. This means that a big part is already contracted, EUR 502 million, as you can see here, and it is the recurrent investment EBITDA, and the annualized, it is EUR 232 million of the EUR 293 million signed, so that is pro rata for what we own, is already income generating. So it is more and more the REITs part of our business is becoming more and more important. There is a big cushion underneath of what we do. Then the asset management, it is not very much looked at, but it is a silent grower behind.
As we do more and more joint venture vehicles, we also have asset management fees. In 2020, it represented EUR 14.7 million on an annualized basis. In 2025, it was already EUR 33.7 million. With what we think we are going to grow, we extrapolated to roughly EUR 80 million- EUR 100 million in 2030. That is where we want to grow to with our asset management platform, as we own more and more assets. So it is property and facility management fees, partly that is paid by our tenants, and then it is asset management fees, and that is paid by our joint ventures.
In total, we have now EUR 9.2 billion of assets, of which EUR 6.7 billion sits in the JVs, of which we own 50%. So we have 5 million of lettable area which sits in this joint venture. It is 213 buildings. In total, we have 266 buildings now which are income generating. Then we have our renewable energy. Renewable energy was started in the first place to be able to comply with all the new rules. But we have always looked at it as it needs to make money.
It has to be a business. It has grown quite a lot, and we have diversified it quite. So if you look at, we have EUR 140 million invested at more than 10% gross yield in our solar panel installations, for which we think the lifetime is 25 years on our roofs. We own that 100% ourselves. VGP Renewable Energy is our own company.
We are 100% ownership. The joint ventures have nothing to do with it. We have installed 193.4 MW peak, and we have 32 under construction, and virtually every roof now of every building which we construct on, we put solar panels on top. Either we sell the energy into the grid, or mostly we deliver it to our customers, or otherwise we just pool it and then sell it to our customers with a PPA agreement. So most of it is the thing.
64% of the platform is live today, but we still have a lot under construction. Then it always takes a little bit of time to connect these things. You are ready, but then somebody needs to come and approve them. That is why there is always a lag inside. So the EUR 140 million looks at first half year, we had EUR 7.6 million of income against that. But a big part of this EUR 140 million are things which are still under construction.
At least EUR 20 million is still under construction, so not income generating yet. And it grows. It keeps on growing, and it is a nice business. It is a high-yielding thing. Then we have taken a look at batteries. Now, there are a lot of companies who specialize in batteries. There was a nice article this morning in the newspaper about it, how many billions are flowing into batteries.
For us, the same as with data centers, it is a byproduct because we have a land bank on which we can do it, and it is a very nice product to make a profit on it. But we are not becoming a battery storage company. We are not becoming a data center company. Like many of my competitors have completely transferred to, "We do not do that anymore.
We do just data center." We are not going to do that. But we have grid connected. We have grid connection. We have big grid connections sometimes. Here we have a very big grid connection. We have a huge grid connection in Hagen. We have big grid connection in Vélizy. We have big grid connections in the Netherlands, of all places, where we have already connected. So, we already have installed 31.5 MW peak. We have under construction or waiting for the permit for another 140 MW. And I do not know if it says you something, but these are big projects. That is quite sizable. It is a lot of things. And we have another EUR 80 million in the pipeline.
So what we want to do is when it is a warm day, like this summer we had many, then many of the solar panel things are just shut down because there is too much electricity produced. Germany has 4x the capacity which is needed installed in solar panels on its roof, 4x . It is a total overkill. So if at the moment when it is a warm day, then it is reduced and you cannot do. So the best thing to do is, and then the electrical energy is also minus, it is negative because they pay you to not go online. So we store it, and then when there is a peak, when there is not enough capacity, we release it.
And for our tenants, if it is related to a tenant, smaller installations, during the day, if they cannot use it, we just store it in the battery so they can use it at night. And that is very, that is small projects on life. That is a little bit what we are doing. So it is growing fast. It is inherent now to our business model. Everybody does it in our companies throughout the whole 18 countries where we are active in, and it has become part of our daily normal business.
Then the moment supreme where you have all been waiting for and why you are here, I think. Data centers. Now, I have been very wary on talking about data centers because it creates expectations. Everybody is looking at technology today, and these things are very difficult to develop.
There are many people talking about them, but then you look at the actual capacity. We have Sarah Wilkinson standing right straight in front of me, who comes from Microsoft. Hi, Sarah. Working for us already since quite some time now. If you look at the real data center market and you compare the numbers, which are really live and operational, to what is talked about, it is a fraction. It is ridiculous how little data center capacity in Europe we have compared to the United States. It is ridiculous. It is just all because of congestion of power. It is all because of troubles with getting the permit. It is also because a lot of local communities just do not want it, point. Because it consumes all the energy. It kills all the other projects. Nobody can produce anymore. There is no more work for the people.
That is how they think about it. It is not necessarily true, but it is how they think about it. Many projects have been killed also in Germany just because the local authorities do not want to. That is why we only speak about where we feel very sure that we are going to be able to deliver. We shut up about everything else where we are just taking a look at from a glance from far away. Why do data centers fit VGP? In the first place because we have powered land, a good relationship with the local community. We have made a deal with them that we can partly do it. We are in a lot of places where the European Tier 1 and Tier 2 markets are. I will show you right away. We have land plots there which have power.
That is a bit why it suits very well inside of our another leg to stand on. It monetizes powered land data center, of course. For us, we are not going to, like a snake, change the thing in our skin and become a different animal. For us, it is an extra income source which we want to do, again, together with a partner which is specialized in it. We do not want to take the execution risk on ourselves alone. I visited many of these data centers. The construction part is not what is scaring me. I think that is something which VGP can do with all of its thing. What is scaring me is the engineering part and how fast this thing is evolving. We see the data centers which I have been visiting, all of them are different.
Depending on the age of when they have been constructed, they are all different. They all adapt to a very fast pace to the new things which are coming on. These chips are ever more powerful. They consume a lot more energy. The white room, you would think, it is going to be smaller, but it is actually getting bigger too. The heat is a big problem. You also get legislation around it. Anyway, we have tried to put it in a slide. The constraint has moved from capital. That is not a constraint anymore because there is a lot of capital available for data centers today. If you want to raise money for a data center development, it does not feel like it is a problem. The opportunity is a problem today. There is no more land. There is certainly no land with power available.
AI and cloud demand is increasingly constrained. AI is moving out to, for us in Europe, to the Nordics, where you have a lot of green energy, very cheap power, or to Spain, where you also have cheap power. We have seen some of the things. But we want to, in the first place, concentrate on what is the Tier 1 and the Tier 2 markets, where the cloud solution really need to be because they need to be close to the epicenter of what they are used for. I will come right next to this. Data centers economics are driven by megawatt capacity. The rental price is in megawatts. It is defined by megawatts. So the more megawatts you can offer, the higher the rental price is going to be, but also the higher the CapEx is going to be.
We think we see that it is the opportunity of having very long leases. So when you develop this thing, you have a very long rental income with a very strong covenant normally because the hyperscalers which are around Frankfurt, all the big names, you name them, they are here, Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services. We have all been talking to them already. All of them have been talked to. Everything we do already, all of these things today, we have powered land. We do the permitting. At the moment, we have contracted a company which is called TTSP, a very big planning office, which works for all of the names which I just mentioned, and we are in the design phase of our first data center ourselves together, which we do together with our new partner. It is really ongoing.
We think we can apply for the building permit the first quarter of next year, and we have been promised to have it available by the third quarter of next year. We will see whether that all matches. Maybe there come up some hiccup, but it is the last straight line. We can see the finish. We have a lot of brownfields, and I think the most important thing is when we go and talk to the municipality and they say, "We do not want a data center," we can offer them so many things alongside of it that there is always a trade-off in which we can then say, "Okay, let us do at least a part of it." We only want to do it where we think it is a safe investment. But yeah, with 18 countries as a footprint and 140 parks, of course, there are opportunities.
Of course, there is possibilities. We just need to be careful and not make a mistake. If you look a little bit about the data center growth, the dots which are on here are, believe it or not, but these are all the VGP parks. Yes, there are many. The red circles is what is called the Tier 1 markets. So it is Ireland, it is London, in the first place, it is the Netherlands, it is Frankfurt, and it is Paris, and then you have things which are becoming more and more online. We have Spain, Madrid, we have Milan, we have Switzerland, and then we have Vienna a little bit, and then we have Berlin, which has become bigger and bigger, and then the Nordics overall is more and more an investment into data center. If you look at it, we are not active in Poland.
In France, we have a little bit more land plots already, but it matches in continental Europe. It matches quite well where we have our land plots. There is opportunity inside of it. The problem is in these, what they call the FLAP-D, Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Paris. There is a big congestion in power. On average, you are waiting 7- 10 years for a power connection if you already can get the promise to get it. That's why it's moving. They are looking to other locations, but some of the things you just can't move. We are trying to build a platform.
We have selected two sites inside of our portfolio on which we have an agreement with the city that we can build a data center on which we have a contract, and thanks to Opel, we have a nice contract here. We have a two-time grid connection of 50 MW which we can reserve. I'm sorry. Which we can reserve for. That's one of my employees who doesn't know I have a Capital Markets Day. Which we can reserve for the data center. We are going to partner. What we are going to do, we have these two, I can now talk a little bit more about it. We took you here because you see that building over there with the red facade? I don't know if you can see it, but I can see it from my thing.
You can take a look at it. Behind the parking house, which we are building, we are now demolishing that site. The inside, we are taking everything which is inside already out. There is a solar panel thing on top of the roof, which Frank promised me that by the year-end will be gone, and then we will demolish the building. It will be demolished by February, March. They used to bomb this thing very heavily. We first need to look also that there is nothing left in the ground during the World War. Also here, but don't be worried, it's all cleaned. Then we can start construction as early as we think, ending of next year. You can see that we have an enormous amount of recycled material everywhere on the site, and we will have more even from there.
We will use that to raise a bit also the floor because there is the river Main right next to it. In order to be 100% certain, here there's never been a flooding, but just to be 100% certain it can never happen, we'll raise the floor a bit over there. We have the recycled material for that, kept all of it. As I already said, we have a 65 MW grid available, 64 MW grid available, for which 50 MW we are going to allocate to the DC. Then if we need power for, we have located to this green campus, which is going to be a huge production facility also, the necessary power. That's roughly the 15 which we have extra.
Then we are transforming the power station, which is over there, to generate power. Up to 200 MW, which we could do theoretically if we get the permit for it, but it is now already 112 MW big, so that we can get for sure. We are going to use that partly to supply our industrial projects and partly to expand in the future a bridge for our data center to the new grid connection, which should be no later than 2035.
At least we think now. It was promised for 2032, but we think it is going to be 2035. It is embedded in the local plan, which is underway. We do it with Paragraph 34, which we did the same system as we did this building. It is owned by the local authority, the regional authority, not the local authority. They give the permit.
It is going to go on. We have the power secured and the land, yeah, it is almost really made it. Today I can, with confidence, for the first time, say yes, we are going to make a data center in Rüsselsheim. Yes, it is going to happen. Yes, it is big, because 50 MW is really big in Frankfurt area. They all talk about hundreds of megawatts as if it is nothing, but there is none existing. It does not exist. The only ones which exist of that scale are really owned directly by the hyperscalers, not by anybody else that I know of. Then we have a similar thing in Milan. In Milan, we had a site which we bought really to develop last mile logistics on it in Paderno Dugnano. It is a Tier 2 market.
We asked already a couple of years ago to the grid, the people who own the grid, whether they could provide us electricity. We signed an agreement with them, that they are going to deliver us by the end of 2028, 120 MW ampere, which is a contract, not a contact. It is with an R. We paid for it. We have an agreement with the city council also that we can develop the site as a data center site. So we have contracted also a designer. We are designing our first data center in Milan also, and it is going to be the second work stream, which we will start up with our new development partner. This is the plant. It is not going to be used as is. We are going to dismantle it and build a new plant.
This is one big turbine, and we are going to do all scalable turbines behind each other, so if one falls out, it is always redundant. Just like the grid here, we have a so-called green and a red grid, and we are connected from both sides. So there is actually two distribution centers from which it is connected. So if one falls out, you always have the connection from the other side. This speaks for itself. I already explained everything on it. We are taking a look at it very careful. I want to state once more, which is important, we are not a data center developer. We want to partner with somebody who has really a track proven record and a very good name, and who is building at this moment for all the big names, data centers, and is very professional inside of it.
Potentially, these two I already told, 50 MW and 120 MW. That is 170 MW. Potentially Frankfurt could grow with another 140 MW. We will see. That is music for the future. The 50 MW is a certainty. The rest is something which we need to work for, but we think we can do that. We have the land which we have reserved here. It is 7 hectares. On the 7 hectares, we can do these megawatts. It is more and more concentrated. That is a bit where we are. Many of you will want to ask us, how are you going to finance that? I do not know is the right answer. That is not true.
We have been taking a look at a lot of the CapExes which have been spent on data centers around us, and depending on who the operator is and what is the type of data center, whether it is cohabitation or it is a hyperscaler, the scope is, it goes from 8 till 16. From 1 : 2 in the investment per megawatt, million euros. If we take a careful, not so careful, a EUR 10 million or a little bit more per megawatt, you can see what the implied platform is. We think we can leverage 50% on that, on the data centers, when it is a good lease agreement and a long-term lease agreement and a good name. If we keep 50%, we need to fund 25%. Hence, for us also, it is good that they are here today.
My friends from East Capital, and we are going to see our other friends from Saga, our other thing, because we need to recycle really a lot of capital, which we are going to do now. It is spread over a lot of years, 500- 700 tickets over the next five to six years. Which is for us, absolutely, I would say palatable. We can just do that. That will not be a problem. We do only commit the capital at the moment when the permit is in place. The only thing which we are putting capital inside today is the land we already have. We do not need to. We will bring it in. We will bring it in as at its Value valued as a land for data centers. That is one of the contributions.
Land, permitting, power, and construction is what we are going to contribute to the development pipeline. It will be contributed at market value, that is agreed in the MOU. We will not at purchase price, but at the market value of land suitable for a data center development. We have two seed projects which we bring to the table, and they are very well progressing in power and permitting. Our partner is a real specialist in data center development, and he also operates them. He has more than 100 employees to operate these data centers. They do that. They have a lot of investment management capability. They raised a lot of money to do so. They are quite big. They are going to help us with the establishment of such a vehicle. They have a lot of operating knowhow.
We are going to build together an operating company. We will contribute our Sarah to that and some other people. They are going to contribute also some of those people, amongst others, maybe some technical people. We will have an asset holding joint venture underneath of that, which will have the ownership of the data center to which we will contribute our development pipeline at market value. We will both have 50%. Our intention is to keep 50%, but we have negotiated that we can dilute if it becomes too heavy in a thing, so we can attract other capital insights. I wanted to be very careful when setting this up so that we have all the opportunities open to see what we can do with it. Well, that's the end of my story of today, I think. I think there will be some questions.
I talked exactly 1 hour and 10 minutes, a little bit longer than I should have. I'm sorry. If you have any questions, we have somebody who will run around with a microphone, and I'm happy to take them.
Thanks. Thomas from Deutsche Bank. Could you give us maybe a bit more of a color on the timing and the timeline for the data center scale-up you have planned? Especially by when do you expect the first cash flows to become effective, basically?
It's a good question, but it's a guess from my side. What we have now planned for Rüsselsheim is that we start construction in 2028. I've taken a look at it. It depends a little bit on who the tenant will be and what the requirements will be, because we have a lot of people talking to us, and it might be that we need to do some changes inside of our process. At the moment, it's known as a cohabitation data center, a colocation data center. We think we need two years of construction periods and then some fit out. So we think that by 2030, somewhere in the year, it will start generating cash flow. That's for Rüsselsheim. Paderno will follow two years later. So it's going to take still quite a while. But of course, we will start construction, so the demolition has started now.
We think we will have the permit next year, and we will start construction, probably already at the end of 2027 with all the preparing works. We've looked at many models together with Sarah. You could sell powered land. You could sell core and shell. You can do the whole building fit out with all the generators and everything, et cetera, and you can do a fully, completely ready thing and then just rent space out. We've opted for the third thing, which is more capital intensive, but we did so because we found a very good partner to do it with whom we feel very confident that the management skills of such a thing is completely under control, and it will be a higher CapEx, but also a higher income. That's what we see from it if we look at it today.
It's going to be a higher yielding project than when you just sell the land.
By when can you announce the partner for this one?
Sorry, I didn't hear you.
By when can we expect you to announce the partner?
There is a memorandum of understanding signed. We will announce it at the moment when we have finalized our agreements with them, which should be still this year, I think. It is an intense negotiation.
Hi.
I can hear you.
It is working. Suraj Goyal from Green Street. I just wanted to clarify a little bit on the waterfall for the 225 MW. The other 50 MW in Frankfurt and the 120 MW in Milan, is that already secured power? Then what was the expected timing for that?
Yeah.
Then versus the rest in the pipeline.
In Frankfurt, here in Rüsselsheim, today, we have a 65 MW connection, existing grids. You have driven past one of the distribution points where there is 112 MW at the other side. I do not know if Christopher or Vincent, I do not know who was with you, showed you, but it is existing. Opel used it, and we bought part of that grid connection together with the land plot. So that is allocated to us, and we have it available. There is no more executive risk on the first part of it. The power plant is existing. There is an agreement with KIO in place which is signed that they are doing a permit for transforming that power plant.
How much we are going to be able, because you need an environmental permit for that, is still a little bit in the air, but it has today roughly 100 MW capacity to produce heat. It is the same technology to produce. It is a little bit different, but to produce electricity. In Paderno, we have signed a contract with the grid provider, in which he, under penalties, has agreed to deliver us the power no later than by the end of 2028. So he needs to do some investments for that. He has a permit, which he is asking for it, and he needs to deliver by the end of 2028, 120 MW connection on our land plot. That is in Paderno. On the other sites, it is too early stage to confirm anything or to say there is a lot of other sites which we are looking at.
We are even thinking about converting existing buildings, which we have in some of our parks, into a data center. That is also an opportunity because we have a lot of very well-located plots which are already fully developed, but where there is also an opportunity in the future. That is far too early to talk about it. It is opportunities and no certainties.
Hi, Pieter Runneboom, Kempen. You said that the engineering part scared you a bit, that these data centers are evolving quickly. So what kind of yield on costs are you thinking by building a data center if you compare it to just a simple box?
Substantially higher. Yeah. Substantially higher. Of course, the CapEx in one building is also substantially higher. We have been talking to a lot of potential joint venture partners. They come up with, there is two ways how to look at it, but because they come up with a proposal in which we participate the lands at market value. This is different already for us in our return package than for them as our 50% partner because they pay the full price for the land. So that one thing. Then in their assumptions, their yield on costs are well above 10%. So that is their assumptions. That is their things which they are doing. So that is what we go out from also. We never built one, so we need to trust them. But it is well above 10%, yes. Yeah. This was the estimate last year.
On the financing part, do we see any change in your dividend policy? Would you have dividend in shares and things like this?
I do not think we will do dividends in share. There is no dogmas in our head. It is not like never, but I do not see a change in our dividend policy. As you have seen, our recurring income is growing every year, and it is growing quite exponentially. We have always said our free cash out of the recurrent income is going to be the base for our dividend distribution. So we try to grow it steadily every year a little bit, going forward, and that is the idea that we keep it that way.
Hi, Vivien Maquet from Degroof Petercam. Maybe on the discussion with the partner, on the contribution of the land, do you intend to contribute both land directly or the Milan rather in 2028 when you have, I would say, the power allocation there?
Seeing the size of these things, I think it will be two different project companies, and both will be separately in a different company for sure. We're not going to contribute it today. We will contribute it at the moment. Rüsselsheim probably at the moment when we have the building permit, then it will be contributed. Milan also, at the moment when we have the building permit, then it will be contributed inside of this thing. But the framework agreement will be signed this year.
Okay. Within the discussion, because you say it's intensive discussion, can you elaborate if it's more related to the future pipeline or rather to the two projects that you have in mind?
No. It's related to the two projects. We have already delegated teams from both sides, which are really running the technical discussions today with everybody, so it's a very hot process. We have weekly meetings. I'm going myself for having the discussions around. It's also around the setup of how we are going to operate these things because there is two entities going to operate one single company. So it's a lot about governance and things like that which we are discussing.
Hi, Steven from ABN ODDO. Question, what is the development margin that you expect here, the broad range? Second, when do you expect revaluations to kick in? Is it the permitting, construction, pre-letting?
I think I already answered because the question there was also-
Sure.
What are you expecting as a yield on cost? The yield on cost, we think it is going to be above 10%.
What is the margin or what is the exit yield?
Well, what we see in the market is there is quite a substantial margin, but I do not know what the market is going to be in five years' time when we are really ready, when we deliver the project. I think on our normal things, we have a 30% margin. I hope that we can do a lot more. I am not going to say more on our data center developments. What was your second question?
Revaluation recognition.
Understood. We recognize value always like it is under IFRS. It is a discounted cash flow model. When we do a revaluation, when we do a valuation, it is only after we really started up the building, the construction. There is a valuation, which takes into assumption when the building is starting to theoretically generate rent, so when there is a rental income. Then you deduct from that all of your construction costs, which are still to be incurred. You go back with a discounted cash flow model, and that is then what it goes. Your valuation starts at the moment when you start construction, and then grows over the period until it really starts generating income. That is how the valuations are running.
Thanks.
Yeah. There is still a lot of food. You do not need to grill me too long. And drinks.
Frédéric Renard from Kepler Cheuvreux. Just two quick one from me. First, you said that you bought the land EUR 75 million here. What's the value in the book today?
Well, it's a bit complicated to say it now because this is already under construction. It sits in one company. So there is a part of it which is already revalued. But the rest of the land sits at the original value plus infrastructure and demolition costs where it is at. So there is no big uptake.
Okay. It's clear. The second one on the potential partner, future partner. You said that they have big experience in operating and owning a data center. The question is, when you receive asset management fee out of your JVs, but there obviously there will be the specialized one. Are you going to pay them any amounts regarding to the management of data center?
No, the idea is that we make together an operator. That operator will get the asset fees inside, and it will be split according to the shareholding inside. So 50% of the asset management fees is for us, 50%. We are going to control that vehicle together. That's how it would work.
Pierre Emmanuel from Jefferies. If I am looking at, let's say a closer time is done at 2030 and looking at the upcoming pipeline that you have put on your slide. I think you already committed EUR 1 billion- EUR 1.5 billion to the French President. If you can give us a split of the EUR 2.5 billion that you are expecting to spend over the next few years would be useful. Especially for this one, what would be the total CapEx expected for this site?
The one to the French President and to France was half a billion, not one and a half a billion, and it spread over a very long period of time. It is not in one year or in two years committed. If we look at our development pipeline in France, there is at the moment four land plots, five land plots, which have been committed to or already been bought. If we count together the CapEx in those five, that is half a billion together. That is a little bit where this number came from. That is the commitment which we made. If we look forward, we have at the current period a running rate of, I think, roughly EUR 750 million a year now. That is where we are. We think we can recycle enough out of our joint ventures to fund also that and a bit more.
In the pipeline, we want to do roughly EUR 1.5 billion in one vehicle and roughly EUR 3 billion in the other vehicle. Recycling out of that is going to be a lot of capital, which is now enclosed in our existing pipeline. I think we were going to be very well-funded. The Rüsselsheim site is you need to divide it up, I think in, three parts. One is the green campus, and the people from Opel are here, so I cannot disclose anything on my investments. They are listening. [Non-English content] . The other site is roughly 230,000 sq m, which we are going to develop. Our average construction cost, including everything, but it is very average because we do not know how much office there is going to be and how specialized the building is going to be.
But on average, let's say it is EUR 650 per square meter, and you know what is the CapEx going to be there. The data centers, I already said what I think it is going to be. We have 50 MW. We have the land already, but the 50 MW, the construction cost is going to be roughly EUR 500 million. EUR 500 million . Of which we need to deliver 25% in equity, theoretically. Yes.
Okay. That is clear. Maybe a quick follow-up question on your capital recycling strategy. I think some people expected some closing sooner than the one that you are expecting to do by the end of this year. It would be very useful to give us more colors on the process. Why is it taking time? What could be the amount expected, and the closings also expected for 2027?
For Saga I, the one which is still going to close, it is just a timing issue. We have a lot of assets under construction, which are earmarked to go in there, and they are just not ready yet. We will do a transaction which is roughly EUR 550 million, I think, of which part is going to be transacted in this year and another part in the first quarter of next year, end of the first quarter of next year. That is how it is looking like. There is no issue at all. The due diligence has started. The thing is running. It is just because we needed some time to lease some things out or to finish some other buildings, and it is just a movement in time. We do not want to go little asset by little asset.
We always want to do a bigger one, because otherwise we have all these costs of doing the due diligence and everything again. It is also with the bank financing, so we want to do it by big lump sums. I think roughly EUR 275 million, EUR 250 million is going to transact still this year. I need to look where Piet is because he knows roughly what it is. It is that amount, yes? Yeah. Plus, minus, and the rest in the next year. Then, the other two, they have been set up. We are starting now with all the marketing. We have been starting with the marketing. There is due diligence ongoing from investors, so it needs a little bit of time before we can really do a transaction, and we plan to have that in the next year.
I am always amazed about the question because it sounds like as if it is a very easy process, but it is really defining and agreeing everything with all these people, it is taking quite some time before we can actually do a transaction. But we have always delivered on it, haven't we? Which is, I know, no guarantee for the future, but anyway.
Lynn from KBC. Just a question. You said you would start with a 50/50 joint venture, but over time you are willing to dilute your stake. How do you look at the risk of diluting, and are there any ways to circumvent that?
Yeah. The way how we look at it is, until now, we also had that option with Allianz. We could also, with Allianz, scale down to a 25%. We have that thing in our agreements. For us, it was a safety trigger that if in any event we could not just follow anymore because we are growing so fast in putting the capital on the table, we could say, "Okay." By still remaining in control and having the asset management, we could dilute to 25%.
We are trying to do a little bit the same in the data center thing, where we see it is very capital intensive, and if at some point the markets are closed and we cannot, we can say, "Instead of doing a 50% contribution, we only want to do a 25% contribution and still remain as the operating partner in place." So it is building in protection for ourselves going forward rather than seeing it as a risk. The dilution would be one-on-one, so the economical value would remain the same. There is no punitive dilution for seeing if we cannot follow. We have a right to dilute one-on-one. So somebody would put more capital inside than we do, but our economic part remains the same value.
Last one?
Last question. I will drink a glass with you over there, so you can grill me afterwards.
Great. Thank you very much. Marios Pastou here from Bernstein. Thank you for taking the question. You mentioned you have thought about various different models within the data center space, all the way from powered land up until the fully fitted turnkey solution. You mentioned, obviously, the high yield on cost potential from going inside the box and doing a more capital-intensive process. How did you also think about that from offsetting that with obsolescence and the fact that the inside the box will need to be replaced over time, depreciated, et cetera? Do those returns still stack up versus doing a powered shell, for example?
Yes. That is a good question. On the data center business, we want to maximize our profits in the beginning, and that is why we choose a partner, a partner with a very big operational knowledge about it and who really knows what data centers are about, who operates them, and who also owns them through various stakeholders behind him. We are learning. We are in a learning phase. VGP is in a learning phase. VGP wants to go first to the thing where it builds up a data center together with somebody in the best possible constitution that we could find, with somebody we trust. Then we have to keep our finger on the pulse to take a look at how this market is evolving. Because this technology, I mean, you use probably cloth or you use other things.
It is incredible how fast things go inside of it, and it is also in the infrastructure part. So your question is very right. Do we want to own this thing over a longer period of time? Then the answer is, I do not know today. Probably yes, but the option might also be, hence also the possibility, and there is no defined point when we say we dilute inside, that we sell off our parts to the operator or to the people who use it, or to institutional investors. But that is a thought for later. First, we want to build it and make it usable, and then we will see. But I have exactly the same thoughts around it. We need to learn. This is going to be a learning process which we all need to do about, is this then future-proof? Is this going to remain?
Is this in 20 years still a fantastic asset? Location-wise, it probably will be. But the building? That's a good question, and we will need to keep our eyes and our mind open and be very wise in going forward. But what I can tell you is that this location in Rüsselsheim, so close to Frankfurt, with a grid connection, with the people who are around it, we have had demands. Alois even sent in from every bigger player which is around active here in the thing. These cloud solutions, most of them are, when they have one or two or three, they also want a fourth and a fifth because they need redundancy, and they need them not very far away from each other. Rüsselsheim sits in an ideal sweet spot. From the demand side, it's not a problem.
But your question is very right to the point. How is it going to evolve? At the end of the lease term, how is the building going to look like? I don't know. I want to say wholeheartedly a warm thank you for having taken all the effort to come here. I know it was not easy. But I hope you enjoyed it, or I hope you're still going to enjoy it, the time we spend together. I hope to see you soon again in the future on other events, on other occasions. It's hefty times outside of there, but I'm a believer in the future. I'm a believer in the things that crises come and go again, and we need to think long term. As I said already in the beginning, there is a lot of things which are driven with the reporting every half year.
There is a lot of things which is in our mind, which is really thinking through a cycle on where we want to be. As I already said, I think we've armed ourselves well, very well, to do nice things in the future. Thank you