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Germany’s sovereign cloud push is advancing with Deutsche Telekom and SAP profitable a BMDS AI platform tender constructed on the “Deutschland-Stack”, whereas Thales expands its Google Cloud-powered sovereign mannequin in Germany alongside its French PREMI3NS infrastructure. STL Companions has an excellent overview of the EU gigafactory push, alongside.
In sum – what to know:
Deutschland-Stack – Deutsche Telekom and SAP have received a €250m BMDS tender to construct a sovereign PaaS for public administration after Google Cloud withdrew its protest; the platform runs on the Deutschland-Stack.
Sovereign redundancy – Thales is constructing a German sovereign cloud to reflect its French S3NS/PREMI3NS setup, each with (and separate of) Google Cloud; it claims full EU-based management and geo-redundancy.
Telco-based inference – Analyst home STL has reviewed the EU’s €20bn AI gigafactory scheme to construct 5 giant GPU clusters; telcos are sometimes engaged as minority companions, however their alternative is with inference providers.
A few developments round sovereign cloud in Germany – as Deutsche Telekom (DT) has received a joint-tender with SAP from the Federal Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization (BMDS) to construct an area cloud system for presidency AI functions, and French aerospace and defence group Thales has stated it is going to construct a sovereign cloud within the nation to go complement and in addition back-up its PREMI3NS services in France.
Aside from the situation and the logic, there’s a frequent thread right here within the form of US-based Google Cloud – which withdrew authorized objections about how the BMDS tender was evaluated and awarded, to clear approval for the DT/SAP win, and which can be straight concerned within the Thales proposition, offering the underlying infrastructure and platform know-how for a brand new Thales authorized entity to handle on sovereign EU phrases.
Deutsche Telekom and SAP
DT and SAP have been the “top-ranked bidder” on the BMDS tender, stated the German telco. The deal, reportedly price €250 million, is to supply PaaS providers for AI functions on a “high-performance, safe, and sovereign” cloud platform, which will likely be shared by federal authorities, states, and municipalities. Affirmation of the choice by BMDS comes after Google Cloud and German IT consulting agency Adesso withdrew their “procurement complaints.
Adesso and Google Cloud had submitted their very own Thales-style consortium-bid for the BMDS contract. Experiences in Germany say they challenged the tender after being excluded from the procurement course of for alleged formal errors in its bid paperwork. Their grievance triggered a evaluation process earlier than Germany’s procurement chamber, quickly delaying the contract for Deutsche Telekom and SAP. Its withdrawal eliminated the authorized block.
The BMDS platform relies on the so-called Deutschland-Stack, which underpins DT’s entire sovereignty push – combining its Munich-based AI compute manufacturing facility, residence to 10,000 Nvidia GPUs, with an administration / orchestration layer from T-Programs, dealing with sovereign cloud operations, governance, and providers. SAP and Siemens have been concerned from the beginning, supplying enterprise AI software program and industrial AI workloads, respectively.
The BMDS PaaS surroundings is deployed as a devoted sovereign occasion on the stack, tightly built-in with the underlying infrastructure, but in addition functionally separate. An announcement stated: “The platform is designed as a central hub for the general public administration sector: scalable, expandable, and interoperable with current specialised procedures. What begins at this time as infrastructure will likely be tomorrow’s improvement surroundings for AI-powered public providers.”
It added: “The objective is for public authorities to construct on frequent technical requirements and platforms sooner or later as a substitute of creating quite a few standalone options. That is meant to make public administration extra trendy, safe, and environment friendly.” The primary software is n AI answer, referred to as KIPITZ, to help public sector employees with doc processing, data administration, translations, textual content summarization, and quicker planning and approval procedures.
Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger stated: “We’re implementing a strategic determination: high-performance digitalization for the federal authorities, states, and municipalities will run on infrastructure that we management ourselves – safe, scalable, and interoperable inside Europe. Along with our companions, we’re setting the benchmark by which digital sovereignty will likely be measured sooner or later. Now it’s time to carry digital options into public administration at scale.”
Thales and Google Cloud
In the meantime, the Thales undertaking in Germany will observe its French mannequin, the place S3NS, a majority-owned Thales joint-venture subsidiary with Google Cloud, runs a sort of sealed EU-version of Google Cloud’s infrastructure. Its PREMI3NS services, distributed throughout three information centres, all managed by S3NS, launched in October (2025) and secured SecNumCloud 3.2 certification from France’s Nationwide Cybersecurity Company (ANSSI) in December.
It was the primary, and stays the one, market participant to safe the ANSSI qualification for its infrastructure (IaaS), container (CaaS), and platform (PaaS) as-a-service layers concurrently, in a single determination. The SecNumCloud 3.2 designation is a safety and digital sovereignty qualification customary, created and enforced by ANSSI, and a part of the French authorities’s Cloud on the Centre doctrine.
This mandate requires public administrations and significant infrastructure (OIVs) – together with corresponding to healthcare suppliers, defence teams, and utility firms – to make use of certified platforms to host delicate information. Thales’ tie-up with Google Cloud in Germany will observe the identical sample: devoted infrastructure, managed and operated by a brand new German entity, which Thales will absolutely personal and management. Will probably be obtainable typically by the top of 2026.
The brand new German working unit, as but unnamed, will likely be “legally and operationally impartial from Google Cloud”, and managed by native employees – “making certain that no third occasion, together with non-European entities, can entry the info inside it”, it stated. The mix of its cloud websites in France and Germany is an “industry-first” as a “pan-European, geo-redundant” sovereign cloud providing a “distinctive cross-border catastrophe restoration answer in Europe for Europe”.
The German answer is out there in “preview” now. It’s being designed to realize C5 and C3A frameworks from Germany’s Federal Workplace for Data Safety (BSI) – as a security-based analysis framework (relatively than a sovereignty certificates, about authorized isolation and so on), and a more recent ‘cloud autonomy’ evaluation (nonetheless not a full SecNumCloud-style certificates with authorized and operational constraints; however Germany’s prime sovereignty measure).
Christoph Ruffner, chief govt and nation director for Thales in Germany, stated: “This can be a direct response to personal and public sector German organizations wanting entry to Google Cloud’s know-how underneath full German management… We’re delivering an answer that ensures delicate workloads stay protected against any extraterritorial attain whereas assembly the distinctive safety and compliance necessities of our clients.”
Marianne Janik, vp for EMEA North at Google Cloud, stated: “[This is] a major milestone in our dedication to digital sovereignty in Germany and Europe. By combining the facility and scale of Google Cloud with Thales’ deep experience in cybersecurity and native operational management, we’re enabling German organizations even in essentially the most delicate sectors to innovate with confidence, whereas assembly particular authorized and operational safeguards.”
The press be aware consists of quotes from a bunch of Germany-based clients, together with: AOK Niedersachsen, Deutsche Börse, College Hospital Schleswig-Holstein, Bechtle Clouds, Deloitte Germany, and SoftwareOne Deutschland.
Gigafactories and telcos
Individually, analyst home STL Companions has a new report concerning the EU’s €20 billion AI ‘gigafactory’ initiative, which can use private and non-private capital to fund as much as 5 large-scale AI compute services to help frontier mannequin coaching with greater than 100,000 GPUs per web site. The programme is the centrepiece of its InvestAI initiative, introduced on the AI Motion Summit in Paris in February final 12 months (2025). The STL report supplies context for the dialogue above.
RCR wrote final week about Telefónica’s consortium bid for funds for a Spanish gigafactory. The narrative is, after all, about weaning the bloc of US (plus some Chinese language) tech, whether or not hyperscalers – like Google Cloud, now repeating its French trick with Thales in Germany; or Microsoft and AWS, with related initiatives – or frontier AI mannequin suppliers. STL namechecks OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and DeepSeek close to the latter cohort.
It writes: “Europe has world-class AI analysis, a rising open-source ecosystem, and one credible frontier AI participant in Mistral, [but it lacks] the infrastructure to coach and scale fashions. EU firms depend on US hyperscalers, [and] non-EU business priorities, provide constraints, and coverage selections. The coverage addresses a strategic hole: making certain Europe has the compute capability and industrial base to take part meaningfully in frontier AI.”
It has a useful-looking map as effectively (see above) that exhibits the proposed location of all of the bloc’s AI factories, whether or not giga-sized or customary – principally all over the place besides Portugal, Turkey, Estonia, bits of Scandinavia (billed as AI manufacturing facility partner-countries). It additionally supplies a scale comparability (see under), gigafactory versus common-or-garden AI manufacturing facility, together with measures for web site numbers, GPU counts, funding sources, funding fashions, and functions.
STL says the European Fee (EC) acquired 76 submissions to its preliminary name for a present of palms in June final 12 months, overlaying 60 websites in 16 member states. Proposed investments totalled greater than €230 billion. Telefónica stated final week it anticipated the ultimate name for proposals to shut in June, with choice selections to observe later within the 12 months.
It cites a number of different consortia: “Deutsche Telekom and Brookfield in Germany, Scaleway’s AION consortium in France, a Portuguese public-private bid involving Altice Portugal and NOS, Nokia’s Finnish proposal across the current Lumi supercomputer, and Romania’s deliberate multi-site Black Sea AI Gigafactory at Cernavodă and Doiceşti.”
The agency additionally notes that business AI gigafactories are being constructed “on European soil”: OpenAI’s Stargate Norway facility in Norway, additionally with Nscale and Aker; Microsoft’s Begin Campus web site in Portugal, with Nscale once more; Deutsche Telekom’s AI manufacturing facility in Munich, mentioned above. It runs by means of the worth prop, as included on the backside.
It writes: “The EU’s AI gigafactory programme… is not going to shut the frontier compute hole with the US by itself: €20 billion is substantial by EE public-policy requirements, however modest in contrast with the dimensions of AI infrastructure funding being deployed by US hyperscalers and frontier mannequin firms. Even so, the programme issues.
“Frontier-scale AI compute is coming to Europe by means of a mixture of public-backed initiatives and private-sector builds. The EU’s function will likely be to affect the place that capability is constructed, who can entry it, and the way a lot of the encircling worth chain stays underneath European management or affect.”
Gigafactories will likely be sited the place vital energy is out there
“AI gigafactories want 200–500 MW of contracted, low-carbon energy and a allowing pathway that may ship capability in three to 5 years. That guidelines out FLAP-D metros and directs the build-out towards Member States with grid headroom, hydropower or nuclear capability e.g. the Nordics, Spain and elements of central Europe. Operators with land-banks, substation relationships and grid-adjacent fibre in these geographies will anchor the consortia that win websites.”
Lengthy-haul interconnect strikes from accent to vital path
“Frontier coaching spans a number of websites, and the ensuing fashions nonetheless have to achieve finish customers underneath EU data-residency guidelines. That makes deterministic, high-capacity optical hyperlinks, between gigafactory clusters, hyperscaler areas and edge inference nodes, non-negotiable relatively than good to have. The chance for fibre operators is unusually predictable: gigafactory geography factors to Nordic-to-FLAP-D and Iberian-to-FLAP-D corridors as the first new long-haul routes, permitting capability planning forward of demand relatively than chasing it.”
Inference is essentially the most accessible telco play, not the gigafactory itself
“A handful of European telcos are in gigafactory consortia (e.g. Deutsche Telekom with Brookfield in Germany, Altice Portugal and NOS in Portugal, Scaleway through the AION consortium in France), however they enter as minority companions alongside industrial, data-centre and vitality infrastructure leads.Telcos will seemingly not personal or function the frontier coaching layer at scale. The extra accessible worth sits one tier down, in serving educated fashions to enterprises and public-sector customers underneath EU data-residency, safety, latency and compliance guidelines.
“Telcos carry a reputable start line with distributed infrastructure, enterprise relationships, safety credentials, community APIs and edge compute a reputable beginning hand. Nevertheless, that is essentially the most contested market in European digital infrastructure: hyperscalers’ sovereign-cloud choices, GPU clouds (Nscale, CoreWeave), specialist sovereign gamers (OVH, Scaleway, T-Programs) and Mistral itself are all chasing the identical workloads. Telcos that watch for the gigafactory programme to mattress in will discover the inference buyer base already spoken for.”