European telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom has announced the launch of its Industrial AI Cloud, supported by one of the largest AI factories in the region. The AI factory has been built over the past six months in Munich’s Tucherpark, in association with NVIDIA and data center partner Polarise.
In a press release Deutsche Telekom said that it aims to provide companies, research institutions and the public sector in Germany and Europe with high-performance, sovereign computing power for artificial intelligence (AI). The AI factory is already operating at over a third of its capacity with existing customers.
Tim Höttges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, said, “We are investing in AI, in Germany as a business location and in Europe. Our AI factory in Munich is the basis for innovative business models, for industry, start-ups and the government – and for sovereignty. We are proving here that Europe can do AI.”
“For the Investment Plan to succeed, we need both – public and private investment. We have created the conditions for public investment and are now working to ensure that investments are made at speed,” says the German Federal Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil. “This is an important stake for the German and European AI ecosystem. Not only do innovative companies benefit from this, it also strengthens digital sovereignty.”
“The convergence of artificial intelligence and the physical world is sparking an industrial revolution that will fundamentally transform how products are designed, manufactured, and operated,” said Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at NVIDIA. “The Industrial AI Cloud provides the sovereign, high-performance AI infrastructure that Europe needs to capture this opportunity and lead the next era of industrial innovation.”
The infrastructure is built on nearly 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, including NVIDIA DGX B200 systems and NVIDIA RTX PRO™ Server GPUs, — to deliver a computing power of up to 0.5 ExaFLOPS. This would allow all 450 million EU citizens to use an AI assistant or chatbot at the same time.
The Industrial AI Cloud is now available to customers from industry, start-ups, research and the public sector. Companies can flexibly book computing power and platform services as needed – from pilot projects to mission-critical production systems. Deutsche Telekom operates the AI factory under strict requirements for data protection, security and availability on German soil.
Focus on sustainability
For the AI factory, an existing data center in Munich with an area of around 10,700 square meters as part of the ongoing revitalization of Tucherpark, one of the largest European urban development projects, the former data center of the Hypovereinsbank, was gutted and fundamentally modernized. Equipped with high-performance fiber optic connection and state-of-the-art technology.
The data center is powered entirely by renewable energy. It is designed for maximum energy efficiency. In the future, the waste heat will supply the entire Tucherpark district with heat as a source. A modern cooling concept relies on cooling of the data center with water from the nearby Eisbach. The Industrial AI Cloud thus fits into Deutsche Telekom’s sustainability strategy.
European Sovereignty: SOOFI Project on the Industrial AI Cloud
One of the first large-scale projects on the Industrial AI Cloud is the SOOFI (Sovereign Open-Source Foundation Models) research project. Leibniz Universität Hannover has awarded Deutsche Telekom a contract to provide the technical infrastructure for the development of a new European Large Language Model (LLM).
The goal of SOOFI is a sovereign open-source language model with around 100 billion parameters, which is trained and operated entirely in Europe and focuses on European languages. This creates one of Europe’s most important AI initiatives for trustworthy, sovereign language models, focused on European languages and industrial applications.
