Germany Plans Nvidia AI Partnership for Industry, Handelsblatt Reports

Germany's federal government plans a broad partnership with Nvidia to bring artificial intelligence (AI) into German industry, the business daily Handelsblatt reported on October 15, 2026. Citing people familiar with it, the paper said the government is ready to invest hundreds of millions of euros. Government sources confirmed the report, the news agency dpa said in a story carried by heise online. As of October 16, 2026, the government had not officially announced the deal. It could be announced at a government investment summit in Berlin that opens on Monday, October 19.

What would the reported deal cover?

Handelsblatt said the initiative has two goals. The first is to lay a foundation for physical AI, the kind used to train robots and self-driving vehicles. The second is to develop powerful AI models for the factories of the future.

The paper said the federal money would buy computing capacity and pay for training new models. It said Nvidia apparently also wants to contribute, for example by assigning engineers. Nearly a dozen German companies want to take part, according to Handelsblatt. It named Siemens, Audi and the AI company Black Forest Labs.

Germany's public broadcaster ZDF said government sources had also confirmed the plan to it. It reported that the state start-up funding would be used, among other things, to rent computing capacity on a Deutsche Telekom AI cloud. It said Nvidia wants to take part by sending engineers and supplying chips. Citing Handelsblatt, ZDF also said the money could come from funds reserved for the government's Hightech Agenda.

On Friday, October 16, unnamed government officials told Reuters there would be a cooperation with Nvidia and with German companies. They said it was meant to be a significant contribution to advancing industrial AI. They did not comment on its scope.

What is SOOFI, the model project at its center?

Handelsblatt said the agreement would be built around SOOFI, according to Reuters. The name stands for Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models. A foundation model is a large, general-purpose AI model that others can adapt for their own tasks.

SOOFI is a consortium of German research institutes, universities and two startups. The German AI Association coordinates it, according to Fraunhofer IIS, one of its members. Fraunhofer says the federal economy ministry funds the project with about €20 million. That money is co-financed with European Union funds from NextGenerationEU. It flows through 8ra, an initiative set up by twelve EU member states, heise reported in November 2025.

The consortium's first model, Soofi S, has 30 billion parameters, the values a model learns during training. It uses a design called mixture of experts, so only about 3 billion are active for each query. Fraunhofer says it was trained between March 24 and May 13, 2026. Training used up to 512 Nvidia B200 graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips used to train and run AI models. They sit in Deutsche Telekom's Industrial AI Cloud in Munich.

As of October 16, 2026, Soofi S was not openly available. Its model card on Hugging Face describes a closed beta with selected partners. It says the final model will be released under a permissive license, without gated access. When the project began, its goal was a model with 100 billion parameters, heise reported.

What is the Munich computing center behind the plan?

Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia announced the Munich project on November 4, 2025. Telekom described it as a one-billion-euro partnership. It said the center would hold up to 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. It said the build would raise Germany's AI computing power by around 50 percent. It also said the project was independent of the EU's plan for AI gigafactories.

The center officially opened in Munich's Tucherpark on February 4, 2026. Telekom said it runs on nearly 10,000 Blackwell GPUs, with computing power of up to 0.5 exaFLOPS, a measure of calculations per second. The company said existing customers were already using over a third of its capacity. It named SOOFI as one of the first large projects on the system.

Why does Germany want its own AI models?

Fraunhofer says SOOFI's goal is to offer companies, public administration, researchers and startups independent alternatives to non-European AI models. When the project began, heise described its background as the growing dependence of German companies on AI models from the US and China.

The plan would still lean on a US supplier. Soofi S was trained on Nvidia chips, and the reported deal would add Nvidia engineers and hardware. Handelsblatt noted that Nvidia has become the leading supplier for training modern AI models, with few alternatives.

Reuters noted that the government said in September that it remained committed to building AI capacity to strengthen Europe's digital sovereignty. For background on the idea, see what sovereign AI means.

What happens next?

The Invest in Germany Summit runs on October 19 and 20, 2026. The economy ministry organizes it for the federal government. October 19 is an invitation-only evening reception. October 20 is the main day, held at the ESMT Berlin business school. Its preliminary program includes a session on industrial AI and semiconductors. Economy Minister Katherina Reiche and Siemens chief executive Roland Busch are listed for it.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz plans to meet Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang on Monday evening, Reuters reported. The agency said the government expects about 200 companies at the summit.

Several things are still unknown:

• the exact sum the government will commit
• which companies will sign up
• how much computing capacity the money would rent
• whether an agreement will be signed or only announced, and when work would start

Separately, the EU is taking bids for much larger AI centers. EuroHPC, the EU's supercomputing body, accepts applications for its AI gigafactories call until December 3, 2026, at 17:00 CET. The European Commission says the call for up to seven gigafactories is backed by up to €10 billion in EU and national funding. The Sovereign AI Investment Tracker follows that deadline and other national AI pledges.