Google and adesso have withdrawn their procurement complaints. This clears the way for an AI platform that will, for the first time, provide a shared infrastructure for the federal government, states, and municipalities. Deutsche Telekom, together with SAP as the top-ranked bidder, has been awarded the contract by the Federal Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization (BMDS) for the tender “Provision of PaaS services for AI applications on a high-performance, secure, and sovereign cloud platform.”
With this decision, the German government is sending a strong signal: Germany is accelerating the automation of administrative processes. Karsten Wildberger, Federal Minister for Digitalization and State Modernization, emphasized:
“With the AI cloud, we are creating the backbone of a sovereign, digital, and AI-enabled public administration in Germany. We are implementing a strategic decision: high-performance digitalization for the federal government, states, and municipalities will run on infrastructure that we control ourselves — secure, scalable, and interoperable within Europe. Together with our partners, we are setting the benchmark by which digital sovereignty will be measured in the future. Now it is time to bring digital solutions into public administration at scale and accelerate the modernization our country urgently needs.”
For Tim Höttges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG, the decision is also a political commitment: “Anyone who wants to remain relevant in the world must lead in the race for digital sovereignty. Europe has enormous catching up to do — and we will not close that gap through discussions, but through action. Telekom and SAP are leading the way here. Together, we are ensuring that Germany and Europe take their digital future into their own hands.”
The AI platform is designed as a central hub for the entire public administration sector: scalable, expandable, and interoperable with existing specialized procedures. What begins today as infrastructure will become tomorrow’s development environment for new AI-powered public services.
Among the first applications is KIPITZ — an AI solution that supports public sector employees with intelligent document processing, knowledge management, translations, text summarization, and the acceleration of planning and approval procedures. The platform integrates AI services, development environments, and interfaces to existing specialized procedures. It will run on Telekom’s sovereign infrastructure.
For SAP, the initiative also underscores the strategic importance of sovereign AI infrastructure: “Digital sovereignty and artificial intelligence go hand in hand. This initiative addresses exactly that: we are contributing our strengths in business processes, data, and trustworthy AI through the SAP Business AI Platform to accelerate innovation in the public sector together with Telekom – secure, scalable, and based on a common standard for municipalities, states, and the federal government as part of the Germany Stack,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE.
The AI platform is a key building block of the so-called Germany atack — a shared digital infrastructure for the federal government, states, and municipalities. The goal is for public authorities to build on common technical standards and platforms in the future instead of developing numerous standalone solutions. This is intended to make public administration more modern, secure, and efficient.
