Deutsche Telekom/T-Systems has won a new contract worth tens of millions for its Industrial AI Cloud. Leibniz University Hannover has awarded the contract to provide the technical infrastructure for the SOOFI (Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models) research project in the AI factory. The goal of SOOFI is to develop a new, powerful, and sovereign large language model (LLM) with around 100 billion parameters – operated and trained entirely in Europe. This is intended to replace Teuken7B, which currently has 7 billion parameters. Scientists from six leading German research institutions and two start-ups are collaborating on the project to provide sovereign European alternatives to AI technologies from the US and China.
SOOFI is one of the most important European AI initiatives, significantly supported by the Fraunhofer Society, the German AI Association, and the Center for Sovereign AI (CESAI). The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and aims to lay the foundation for a trustworthy and technologically independent European AI infrastructure. The focus is on European languages and the development of models that advance the industrial use of artificial intelligence.
Digital sovereignty is critical to Europe as a business location. We are proud to be working with Leibniz University, the Fraunhofer Institute, and the German AI Association on a project that is crucial to Europe's future viability and independence in the field of artificial intelligence.
Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, Member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom and CEO of T-Systems
Telekom subsidiary T-Systems is providing its new Industrial AI Cloud for training the sovereign large language model. The large language model is thus finding its home in one of Europe's largest AI factories, which has over 10,000 GPUs. The total computing power is 0.5 exaFLOPS (exa floating point operations per second) and the storage capacity is around 20 petabytes. The data center is connected to four 400 GB/s fiber optic connections and meets the highest standards of data protection, security, and reliability. Starting in March 2026, a network of around 130 NVIDIA DGX B200 systems with a total of over 1,000 GPUs will be operated exclusively for the European language model SOOFI.
Dr. Nicolas Flores-Herr, Fraunhofer IAIS: “SOOFI brings together leading research teams from Germany to train large open-source LLMs, which represent an important area of a sovereign AI value chain. These are to be used, for example, in industry, SMEs, and the public sector to strengthen the development of an independent European AI infrastructure.”
“With SOOFI, we are laying the foundation for the next generation of European AI models – sovereign, powerful, and entirely in European hands. Large AI models that respect European values are essential for building trust in AI, especially in sensitive areas such as education, medicine, administration, and production,” says Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl from the L3S Research Center at Leibniz University Hannover.
Jörg Bienert from the German AI Association adds: "Alongside initiatives such as the Gigafactory and the EU AI Action Plan, this is an important step in the development of independent AI models as a building block for an open, independent, and powerful ecosystem in Germany and Europe."
