Europe's AI infrastructure expands again! NVIDIA partners with Deutsche Telekom to invest €1 billion in building data centers in Germany

According to Zhitong Finance APP, NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) and Deutsche Telekom AG (DTEGY.US) are preparing to announce a plan to build a €1 billion data center in Germany. This project is part of a broader initiative to expand infrastructure in Europe and provide computing power for artificial intelligence systems.

According to insiders, the two companies will jointly invest in this $1.2 billion (approximately €1 billion) project. SAP SE (SAP.US), the largest software company in Europe, will be a client of the data center.

They stated that Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, SAP CEO Christian Klein, and Germany's Minister of Digital Affairs Karsten Wildberger are expected to officially announce the plan at an event in Berlin next month.

For months, European policymakers and tech industry executives have been discussing the need for Europe to build its own artificial intelligence ecosystem to catch up with competitors like the United States and China. In the U.S. alone, tech companies such as Microsoft (MSFT.US) and Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.US) have committed to investing hundreds of billions of dollars in building artificial intelligence computing facilities.

Jensen Huang and others have criticized Europe for two main issues: first, the slow progress in building local artificial intelligence infrastructure; second, the insufficient speed in supporting companies to use artificial intelligence technology while ensuring data remains within Europe.

As a result of this news, Deutsche Telekom's American Depositary Receipts (ADR) rose by 2.2%, reaching a daily high, and the stock closed up 1.66% on Monday.

However, compared to the "gigawatt-level" data center projects announced globally, the €1 billion data center planned by NVIDIA and Deutsche Telekom is still relatively small in scale. It is reported that the data center in Germany is expected to use 10,000 advanced graphics processing units (GPUs), while a data center being built by SoftBank Group Corp., OpenAI, and Oracle Corporation (ORCL.US) in Texas is expected to be equipped with about 500,000 GPUs.

Currently, NVIDIA, Deutsche Telekom, and SAP have not commented on the matter, and Germany's Ministry of Digital Affairs has not immediately responded to requests for comment. An insider revealed that the three companies plan to build the data center in Munich.

In February of this year, the European Union announced a €200 billion plan to support the development of artificial intelligence in Europe, aiming to triple the region's artificial intelligence computing power in the next 5 to 7 years. Deutsche Telekom has previously engaged in discussions with other companies to participate in the construction of so-called artificial intelligence "gigafactories," but the process has been slow, as the EU has not clarified how it will review project applications and allocate funds