Sovereign AI from Germany

STACKIT, the Schwarz Group's cloud provider, and the Cologne-based AI company neuland.ai want to jointly establish an AI architecture operated entirely in Germany. To this end, they are combining STACKIT's cloud infrastructure with the neuland.ai HUB, an AI management and orchestration platform. This allows customers to access various AI models via uniform interfaces, including Llama, Mistral, Qwen, and large open-source models with up to 120 billion parameters.

The AI models can optionally run “on prem” on the user's hardware, in STACKIT's sovereign cloud in data centers in Germany, or – if desired – also with US hyperscalers, without making a difference on the user side. neuland.ai promises that customer data is stored end-to-end encrypted and the company has no access to it, so it cannot be used for model training. The neuland.ai HUB is also set to become available in the STACKIT Marketplace.

The joint offering is aimed at companies that do not want or are not allowed to send their data to US companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. Under the US Cloud Act, US authorities can access data stored by US companies, even if this data is located in data centers in Europe. With the AI offering from neuland.ai and STACKIT, German companies should be able to meet the regulatory requirements of NIS2, DORA, and the EU AI Act.

(odi)