Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom to build €1 billion German data center

Nvidia Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG are building a €1 billion ($1.2 billion) data center in Germany to bolster infrastructure in Europe that can power complex artificial intelligence systems.

The facility is one of Europe’s largest and will begin operations in the first quarter of 2026, Germany’s biggest telecom operator said in a statement on Tuesday, confirming a report by Bloomberg News last week.

The plans were unveiled at an event in Berlin featuring Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and Deutsche Telekom boss Tim Höttges, as well as the heads of SAP SE, Deutsche Bank AG, and two German government ministers. Their presence emphasised how Europe’s biggest economy is seeking to develop its own AI ecosystem to compete with rivals in the US and China.

“We’re bringing Nvidia AI and robotics to start a new era of Germany’s industrial transformation,” Huang said in the statement, calling the project one of Germany’s largest deployments of advanced AI chips.

SAP, Europe’s biggest software company, will supply its business technology platform and applications for the data center, which will expand an existing facility in Munich. Deutsche Telekom said it will boost Germany’s AI computing power by around 50%.

However, the size of the investment also highlighted the gap between Europe and the US. Tech giants like Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google and startups like OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI computing capacity.

The project in Germany will make use of as many as 10,000 advanced chips known as graphics processing units, according to the statement. That is just a fraction of the size of major facilities planned in the US. A single data center project in Texas, being developed by SoftBank Group Corp., OpenAI, and Oracle Corp. will use about 500,000 GPUs.

The European Union announced a €200 billion plan in February to support AI development in the bloc, with a goal of tripling the region’s capacity to power such systems within the next five to seven years.

Deutsche Telekom has been involved in talks with other companies to participate in the push to build so-called AI gigafactories. But the process has been slow to get off the ground, and the EU has yet to map out exactly how it’ll review bids and allocate funding.

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