The Schwarz group, which is currently the main Retailer in Germany, and owner of the Lidl supermarket chain, wants to advance in the technology sector. For this, he already has plans to try to convince the country’s government to let him be the main developer of a large data center that the EU wants to advance in his plans related to sovereign artificial intelligence. This is: he wants to build a gigafactoría de ia.
The retailer, which is private and controlled by its founder, billionaire Dieter Schwarz, will present his plan to try to achieve it, and in which he is willing to invest several billions, this week, according to several sources that have confirmed it to Bloomberg.
This step of the Schwarz group arrives just when Germany is taking measures to take a part of the 20,000 million euros that the European Union has destined to the construction of new Gigafactories of AI. Therefore, Germany Digitalization Minister Karsten Wildberger will meet this Friday with companies in the country, among which are the owner of Lidl, Deutsche Telekom Ag and SAP. Among the hot springs that will be treated at the meeting is digital sovereignty.
A spokesman for the German Digitalization Ministry has confirmed the celebration of the meeting, and has also pointed out that the Government wants «Reduce the technological units of Germany and Europe, in addition to expanding our experience in key technologies such as AI, cloud, semiconductors and cybersecurity on a large scale«.
Last April, the European Commission announced that it will contribute to the financing of up to five Gigafactories of AI. These gigafactories are large data storage centers, each equipped with about 100,000 advanced chips, and designed to develop AI models. According to the Commission, financing will be an incentive for private investment, with the aim of tripling the capacity in European data centers, from here to five or seven years.
There are already several German companies that have shown their interest in writing to the European Union, with letters in which they detail the approach they would use for the construction of new facilities such as those raised. In the case of the owner of Lidl, he wants to join a joint offer made by several German companies, and hopes to convince several to join it. But it is not clear if the proposal will be fruitful or not.
Earlier this year, the Schwarz group valued working with a group in which Siemens, SAP and Deutsche Telekom were. But the negotiations did not come to fruition. The SAP CEO, Christian Klein, which in principle supported a European alternative to Stargate, said Europe that Europe should invest differently.
The Swartz group, owner of Lidl, has entered technology relatively recently. It began in 2017, developing its own Cloud Computer Service, which it called Stackit, in search of business lines that were more profitable than retail. Apparently, one of the reasons that led them to take this step is in the limited guarantees offered by United States cloud providers regarding data security and privacy.
According to Rolf Schumann, one of the CEOs of the digital division of the Schwarz group, Digits, commented that when no one could tell them where their data were stored, they realized that they needed their own cloud. Then they said they were going to invest 11,000 million euros in Cloud in the next five years. For now, the owner of Lidl has not offered concrete financial plans for the new facilities whose construction wants to lead, although it is currently developing a data center in Luebbenau, south of Berlin, which hopes to become the gigafactoría in which it is interested.
