Deutsche Telekom $DTE (+0,29%) and the Lidl parent company Schwarz Group want to pull together and build a large data center in Germany.
As reported by Handelsblatt, the two companies are holding talks about an AI Factory in order to apply for EU funding.
A Canadian financial investor $BN (+0%) could come on board as a financial backer.
According to Handelsblatt, negotiations are already at an advanced stage.
A Telekom spokesperson said that the company was interested in Gigafactorys in principle. However, he did not want to comment on the specific case, nor did a Schwarz spokesperson.
In the digital age, data requirements are increasing massively and artificial intelligence (AI) applications are hungry for data, including for training their language models. This requires new data centers, which are to be built in Germany or other EU countries and thus make Europe less dependent on the USA.
Deutsche Telekom and the Schwarz Group have already increased their efforts in the area of AI data centers, and the joint project is now set to step up the pace.
At the beginning of November, Telekom announced in Berlin that it would be entering into the construction and operation of AI data centers on a large scale.
At that time, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges announced the launch of a joint project with the chip company Nvidia $NVDA (-0,35%) in which an AI factory is to be built in Munich for more than one billion euros.
"Without AI, you can forget about the industry," said Höttges a month ago. "Without AI, you can forget about Germany as a business location."
The Deutsche Telekom CEO pointed out that only five percent of high-performance AI chips are currently used in Europe and 70 percent in the USA.
Höttges emphasized that the data in the Munich AI cloud should remain entirely in Germany. Only employees from Germany and Europe would be involved in handling the data.
