Germany's own cloud for its own AI

The German Federal Ministry for Digital Development and Modernisation of the State (BMDS) has successfully completed an innovative assignment process: is awarding €250 million for a powerful, sovereign AI cloud to be built as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). According to BMDS, the solution will form the technological backbone of a modern, AI-enabled administration in the future. This will provide federal, state and local governments with a common infrastructure for the first time.

To ensure performance and reliability, the contract was awarded to two consortiums, BMDS announced on Thursday. As the first bidder, Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems, together with SAP, secured the large contract to provide PaaS services for artificial intelligence applications on a powerful, secure and dominant cloud platform.

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A consortium led by SVA (System Vertrieb Alexander), which includes the Schwarz Group's IT division (Schwarz Digits) and the technology company Codesphere, was awarded the contract as the second-best bidder. Within this group, SVA will be responsible for architecture and integration, Schwarz Digits will provide the infrastructure with the BSI-certified Cloud Stackit. Codesphere will contribute at the platform level.

Germany Stack

The platform will serve as a central control point and an important building block of the Germany Stack. Using open standards, uniform interfaces and open source components, common technical standards will be defined instead of developing countless individual solutions.

One of the first applications will be the federal AI solution Kipitz. The system will support document processing, knowledge management, translations and acceleration of planning and approval processes. The solution will operate on the dominant infrastructure. It should be noted that the SVA already manages Kipitz at the Federal IT Service Center (ITZBund), and the team will continue to work seamlessly.

According to the plan, maximum data security will be ensured by a strict zero-trust architecture. In addition, authorities will retain control of their cryptographic keys through encryption concepts such as “Bring Your Own Key”, thus preventing access by non-state entities from third countries. An innovative cold boot technology from Codesphere will also aim to reduce resource costs for applications that require a lot of computing power in operation by up to 90%.

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