Digital infrastructure in Germany: Telekom expands AI data center

In view of growing demand, Deutsche Telekom is expanding its AI data center in Munich. “The first expansion stage is at capacity, well-known industrial companies such as Siemens and Daimler Truck are already using the infrastructure and a well-filled project pipeline shows further demand,” said Ferri Abolhassan, the head of the Telekom subsidiary T-Systems, on Monday.

The additional investment volume amounts to 250 million euros, it said. In the new expansion stage, the power requirements of the servers will almost double to a total of 20 megawatts. The new servers would be equipped with state-of-the-art Nvidia “Blackwell Ultra Generation B300” processors.

These are optimized, among other things, for training AI models. The additional computing capacities are already fully booked, explained Telekom boss Tim Höttges in a press conference. Therefore, planning for the third expansion stage is already underway. “We want to come back in the next few months and announce something new.” He initially did not want to give any further details.

Höttges also emphasized that his company is working on an AI gigafactory. “We want to invest really big in Germany.” He envisages data centers with electricity requirements of three-digit megawatts. Particularly powerful data centers are known as AI gigafactories.

⁠The EU Commission wants to promote the construction of several plants in Europe. “However, we are somewhat disappointed with the tender,” said the Telekom boss. The state-guaranteed minimum capacity utilization is too low. At the same time, an operator must reserve 60 percent of the computing capacity for public institutions. ‌This means high idle costs and makes it difficult to finance such billion-dollar projects.

Deutsche Telekom officially put its Munich AI data center into operation in February. The original investment amount was one billion euros. At that time, Höttges brought up the system as a reference project for a possible AI gigafactory. One of the first users of Telekom's industrial AI cloud is Agile Robots, a Munich-based provider of AI-controlled robots. The German language model “Soofi” was also trained in this data center. (rtr)