The new center is expected to become a reference point for the European artificial intelligence industry, aiming to strengthen the digital autonomy of Germany and the EU in this strategic sector.
“Without artificial intelligence, you can forget about industry. Without artificial intelligence, you can forget about Germany as a business location,” stated Timotheus Höttges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom. According to Höttges, only 5% of high-performance AI chips are currently used in Europe, compared to 70% in the United States. He emphasized the urgent need for Germany to make up for lost ground and invest heavily in AI infrastructure and adoption.
The Deutsche Telekom chief executive also assured that the AI cloud data managed by the new data center in Munich will remain entirely within Germany, with only German and European employees involved in its operation, while the technology will originate from the United States and Germany. “This means there are no longer any excuses for German and European companies not to deploy artificial intelligence on a large scale,” Höttges stressed.
Digital Affairs Minister Carsten Wildberger described the initiative as “a great day for Germany and Europe,” calling it “a symbol of a new beginning” and “another step in Germany’s path toward fully harnessing the opportunities of artificial intelligence.”
On the other hand, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reminded the audience that the concept of Industry 4.0 was developed in Germany. “Germany had this vision of connecting the digital world with the physical one,” he noted. Nvidia is the world’s leading provider of high-performance chips, which are essential for training and deploying artificial intelligence systems.
Deutsche Telekom, already a major cloud services provider operating over 180 data centers worldwide and collaborating with major platforms such as Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure, plans to build the AI data center in Munich’s Tucherpark as only the beginning of a broader artificial intelligence strategy. The company also hopes to be considered for a significant European Union funding program supporting the development of so-called AI Gigafactories.
