The construction of a data center artificial intelligence in Munich, Deutsche Telekom and the American semiconductor company Nvidia jointly announced. OR investment exceeds one billion euros.
«Without artificial intelligence, you can forget the industry. Without AI, you can forget about Germany as a business-friendly location,” said Telekom CEO Timotheus Hetgens, pointing out that only 5% of high-performance AI chips are currently in use in Europe – compared to 70% in the US. Mr Hetgens also stressed that US companies are increasingly focused on expanding artificial intelligence and warned that Germany urgently needs to make up lost ground and invest.
The DT CEO also assured that the AI cloud data of the data center to be operated in Munich will remain entirely in Germany and only employees from Germany and Europe will be involved in its management, while the technology will come from the US and Germany. “This means that there are no longer any excuses for German and European companies not to use AI on a large scale“, underlined Mr. Hetgens.
Digital Policy Minister Carsten Wildberger spoke about “great day for Germany and Europe”for one “symbol of a new beginning” and for “another step on Germany’s path towards decisively exploiting the opportunities of artificial intelligence”.
On Nvidia’s part, CEO Jensen Huang recalled that the concept of Industry 4.0 was developed in Germany. “Germany had this vision to connect the digital world with the physical one“, he stated. His company is the world’s leading provider of high-performance chips essential to the training and use of artificial intelligence.
It is noted that Deutsche Telekom is already a cloud service provider and operates over 180 data centers in the world, while cooperating with major platforms such as Google Cloud, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.
The AI data center to be built in Munich’s Tucherpark is intended to be just the start of a wider AI strategy for Deutsche Telekom, which hopes to be considered for a major European Union funding program for so-called AI Gigafactories.