The Bonn-based company has equipped the facility in Munich with 10,000 specialized processors from Nvidia. The necessary software is provided by Walldorf-based SAP. Some companies, such as Munich robotics manufacturer Agile Robots, have already booked computing capacity at the AI factory. As a result, the facility is currently operating at 30 percent capacity, explained Ferri Abolhassan, head of Telekom subsidiary T-Systems, which is responsible for the cloud business. He hopes to quickly find customers for the remaining 70 percent. If needed, the Munich facility can be expanded.
The investment volume for the AI factory currently stands at one billion euros. According to Höttges, however, this is only the beginning. His company is bidding to build an AI gigafactory. In total, five of these particularly powerful data centers for artificial intelligence (AI) are to be built in Europe. Each of them is expected to use several times the number of processors installed in Munich. Gigafactories are used for training and operating extensive AI systems.
A few days ago, Telekom also announced that its traditional cloud offerings would soon be technologically on par with major US providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google. "Until now, companies had to choose: maximum functionality from overseas or European sovereignty," said T-Systems CEO Abolhassan. The "T Cloud Public" enables fully EU-compliant data processing without access by third countries. It can also be seamlessly combined with the industrial AI cloud.
(Reporting by Hakan Ersen, edited by Ralf Banser. For inquiries, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)
