SOOFI

What SOOFI is

SOOFI stands for Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models. It is a German project to build large, open AI models that companies and public bodies can adapt for their own use. The project's website says it started in September 2025. The German AI Association (KI Bundesverband), an industry group based in Berlin, coordinates it. The federal economy ministry funds it. The project often writes its own name as Soofi.

Fraunhofer IIS, one of the members, lists these partners:

• the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
• the Fraunhofer institutes IAIS and IIS
• TU Darmstadt, the University of Würzburg and the Berlin University of Applied Sciences
• the L3S Research Center of Leibniz University Hannover and the Lamarr Institute
• the startups ellamind and Merantix Momentum

Funding and goals

Fraunhofer says the economy ministry funds SOOFI with about 20 million euros. The money comes through IPCEI-CIS/8ra, which Fraunhofer describes as a European project with over 100 partners in twelve EU member states. It is co-financed by the EU's NextGenerationEU funds. When the project was announced, heise online reported that the funding ran until July 2026. It said the goal was an open model with 100 billion parameters.

Fraunhofer says SOOFI aims to give companies, public administration, researchers and startups independent alternatives to non-European AI models. Heise described the background as German companies' growing dependence on AI models from the US and China.

Soofi S, the first model

Soofi S is the first model in the family. Fraunhofer says it has 30 billion parameters, the values a model learns in training. It uses a mixture-of-experts design, so only about 3 billion are active for each token. It was trained on 27 trillion tokens, mostly German and English text.

Training ran from March 24 to May 13, 2026, on Deutsche Telekom's Industrial AI Cloud in Munich. Fraunhofer says it used up to 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs for about 253,000 GPU hours. When the cloud opened in February 2026, Telekom said Leibniz Universität Hannover had awarded it the contract for SOOFI's infrastructure.

On June 17, 2026, the consortium presented first results for Soofi S. It said the base model matches or beats international models of comparable size on German and English benchmarks. Those are the consortium's own claims.

Where things stand

As of October 16, 2026, Soofi S was not openly available. Its model card describes a closed beta with selected partners. It says the final model will be released under a permissive license, without gated access. The project's website says a public open-source release is planned for 2026. Fraunhofer's page lists the release as planned for September 2026.

On October 15, 2026, Reuters reported that a planned German government AI deal with Nvidia would be built around SOOFI. It cited the business daily Handelsblatt. Reuters said the government had no immediate comment.