T-Systems will provide its new AI factory to six leading research institutes, funded by the German government, to develop sovereign LLM models via the SOOFI initiative
Deutsche Telekom (DT) has won a contract worth tens of millions of euros for its Industrial AI Cloud from Leibniz University Hannover. Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA announced they have jointly built the world’s first Industrial AI Cloud in a €1 billion partnership earlier this month. The contract is to provide the technical infrastructure for the Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models (SOOFI) research project in the AI factory.
SOOFI’s purpose is to develop a new, sovereign large language model (LLM) with around 100 billion parameters, operated and trained in Europe to replace Teuken7B, which 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”, according to the press statement and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. It is also supported by the Fraunhofer Society, the German AI Association and the Center for Sovereign AI (CESAI).
The project aims to lay the foundation for a trustworthy and technologically independent European AI infrastructure. The focus is on European languages and to develop models that advance the industrial use of AI.
T-Systems in play
The Industrial AI Cloud for training the LLM is provided by DT’s subsidiary, T-Systems. It is one of Europe’s largest AI factories with more than 10,000 GPUs and total computing power of 0.5 exa floating point operations per second or exaFLOPS plus storage capacity of around 20 petabytes.
The data centre is connected to four 400 Gbps fibre connections and, DT says, “meets the highest standards of data protection, security, and reliability. 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 from March 2026,
“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,” says Dr Ferri Abolhassan, Member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom and CEO of T-Systems.
Dr. Nicolas Flores-Herr, Fraunhofer IAIS, noted, “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.”
