Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom are planning to build one of Europe’s largest AI factories worth €1 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports.
To do this, the companies will rebuild an existing data center in Munich, which will be equipped with 10,000 of the latest Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. The facility is scheduled to open early next year.
The new factory will increase Germany’s AI computing power by about 50%. Tens of kilometers of fiber optic cable will be laid to connect all the servers.
Deutsche Telekom said it already has its first potential customers, including Perplexity, which plans to use the new resources for its AI services.
Although the project is not part of the EU’s official program to build so-called AI gigafactories (powerful centers with hundreds of thousands of AI chips), it is still an essential step for Europe as it tries to catch up with the US in the development of artificial intelligence.
After the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, global demand for AI computing resources has increased significantly. American companies have already invested hundreds of billions of dollars in new data centers, while European contributions are so far much smaller.
Earlier this year, the large-scale Stargate AI project was launched in the US, which is building data centers for OpenAI. Its investors include SoftBank, Oracle, MGX from the UAE, and OpenAI itself. The initial investment is $100 billion.