Cloud Sovereignty and the GPU Gap

Schwarz Digits – effectively the AWS of the Schwarz Group (Lidl, Kaufland) – reported €1.9 billion in revenue for 2023. That is remarkable and corresponds to roughly 3-6% of the German cloud market just a few years after its founding. The value proposition is "digital sovereignty" and full compliance with German data protection standards.

What are the experiences when migrating workloads to STACKIT? In particular, the mature ecosystems of AWS or Azure are difficult to replicate. What role do these differences play in purchasing decisions and operations?

Another interesting aspect will be the provision of current NVIDIA H100s and subsequent chip generations for training AI models. Meta announced at the beginning of the year that it intends to integrate 350,000 H100s into its data centers by the end of the year. Microsoft (which also provides the infrastructure for OpenAI) and the other hyperscalers will likely build up to a similar extent. At this scale, Schwarz Digits (which already has some A100s and H100s) certainly does not need to invest, partly because no leading foundation models are being trained in Germany. But a smaller cluster would definitely make sense. I see an analogy here to the VC fund Andreessen Horowitz, which makes 20,000 H100s available to its start-ups. German industry and public administration could benefit from a similar initiative, and Schwarz Digits could play a central role in this.