CLOUD
THE GERMAN SCHWARZ GROUP, MOTHER COMPANY OF LIDL, TO OPEN A NEW DATA CENTER BASED ON 100% RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY
The German group Schwarz, owner of the Lidl and Kaufland brands, plans to invest up to 5.6 billion euros by 2033 in a data center in Dummerstorf, near Rostock. This data center will have an electrical capacity of 240 megawatts. It’s the second data center launched since November 2025. The site will meet the group’s IT needs. It will also support the Cloud and Artificial Intelligence services offered to businesses by Schwarz Digits, the group’s IT and digital branch, notably through its European cloud platform, Stackit.
The choice of Dummerstorf is explained by the proximity to a 380-kilovolt high-voltage power line and the availability of wind power produced offshore and onshore. In terms of eco-efficiency, Schwarz’s plan is to use only renewable electricity during normal operation and to have closed-loop cooling to limit water consumption. The Data Center will use outdoor air free cooling, made possible by the cool climate of the north. The development of an urban heating network is planned. A letter of intent has been signed with Rostock city services to recover the heat produced by the servers.
Technological applications will be introduced in the country’s public administration. This includes digital building permits issued on the sovereign Cloud platform Stackit and the rollout of OpenDesk, an open-source office and collaboration suite, starting with secure, fully managed workstations for teachers.
“The regional government’s goal is to reduce its dependence on foreign providers of data centers, Cloud, and AI applications,” explains Manuela Schwesig, Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. “So we see the investment decision by the Schwarz Group as an opportunity to strengthen our independence and the security of our data.
HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
A French expert in advanced computing and AI, Bull was chosen by EuroHPC and the LUMI AI Factory consortium to set up LUMI-AI. This supercomputer, costing 387.8 million euros, is meant to boost the EU’s AI capabilities as it looks to strengthen its independence in AI and high-performance computing. The infrastructure will be hosted by the consortium and deployed in a CSC data center in Kajaani, Finland. It is expected to increase the current capacity of the LUMI supercomputer tenfold, according to a statement from Bull. Described as the “computing backbone” of the site, the supercomputer is meant to boost industrial innovation, scientific research, and the development of advanced AI applications in Europe, particularly in model training and inference. It is scheduled to be deployed in the second half of 2027, with the main funders being EuroHPC JU and the LUMI AI Factory consortium, which includes Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway, and Poland. This new acquisition contract is part of the AI Factories initiative. The system will rely on a direct liquid cooling solution from Bull, which allows the heat produced by the system to be reused to supply the Kajaani district heating network. LUMI-AI will also be powered by renewable electricity
AI
UNIFIED SOVEREIGN AI FOR GERMAN ADMINISTRATIONS
The German Ministry of Digital Affairs announced that the federal government has awarded a major contract to T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, and the software company SAP to develop a sovereign AI cloud platform. The contract involves an investment of 250 million euros, which will be split between the two companies. Deutsche Telekom will get 70% of the amount, and the rest will go to SAP. The German Federal Minister for Digital Affairs, Karsten Wildberger, added that the new platform will be “the backbone of a sovereign, digital administration with AI capabilities” that will help “speed up the country’s modernization.”
The German AI platform is designed as a central hub for the entire public administration sector, scalable, extendable, and interoperable. Once deployed, it will be a key part of the “Germany Stack,” a digital infrastructure of shared services between the federal government, the states, and local authorities.
“The goal is for public authorities in the future to rely on common standards and technical platforms, rather than developing many independent solutions.”
DATA PROCESSING
(Tribute to Le Journal du Net) ARGONOS, the system developed by the French CHAPSVISION to replace PALANTIR, won’t be exclusive to just the DGSI (Intelligence Services)I. France chose the platform for both lots of the OTDH contract (heterogeneous data processing tool), which is meant to equip several ministries and government agencies. “The state wasn’t just looking for a replacement for Palantir, but a solution that could equip all of its departments to handle their data efficiently,” explains Eric Bourry, VP of Innovation at ChapsVision. Deployments will happen gradually, based on the needs and constraints of each administration.The 2015 attacks highlighted the difficulties French services had in sharing, connecting, and using information scattered across multiple systems quickly enough. So the challenge wasn’t just about collecting more data, but about being able to identify a threat amidst the mass of information already available. However, it is the second batch, awarded this year to ChapsVision, that brings the real added value to the platform: intelligence. At the heart of Argonos is a knowledge graph, around which the different analysis components are structured. The platform notably relies on technologies from the acquisitions of Sinequa and Systran. The first provides cognitive and semantic search capabilities and RAG. The second offers automatic translation, transcription, and multilingual processing functions. Once the data is ingested, cleaned, and enriched, it is transformed into entities linked together in the graph.”The knowledge graph allows us to connect events that, at first glance, don’t seem related.
SOVEREIGN COLLABORATIVE SUITE
Jamespot is buying Alinto, a French professional email provider that handles over 100 million emails a day. The group is adding an email component to its platform, aiming to offer a sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
QUANTUM COMPUTING
FRANCE AND THE NETHERLANDS REINFORCE THEIR COLLABORATION
On the occasion of the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron and Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten to TU Eindhoven, to discuss bilateral tech collaboration, TNO CEO Tjark Tjin-A-Tsoi and Quobly CEO Maud Vinet officially launched a new strategic partnership to accelerate the development of a scalable European quantum computing platform. Quobly also signed a partnership with TNO spin-off Orange Quantum Systems. France’s world-class semiconductor manufacturing base combines well with the Netherlands’ advanced systems engineering and open-access testing infrastructure.
More details here
Nota: TNO, a renowned national Dutch research center, helped the ECA to set up the Teaming Up meetings during the latest IN CYBER FORUM in Lille, when cybersecurity researchers, vendors and CISOs, shared views on the cybersecurity hottest topics, including Post Quantum Cryptography.
COLIBRI TD RAISES A 4M€ funding to SECURE ITS DEVELOPMENT
The Parisian start-up, expert in software for the Quantum and hybrid world, has closed a Seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, which had already made a pre-Seed investment of one million euros. The funds will go into R&D around H-DES, its hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for solving differential equations. ColibriTD also plans to strengthen its research teams and accelerate its international development. The company currently has about twenty employees. Its goal is to apply quantum computing to multiphysics simulation, covering areas from fluid dynamics to material deformation. It’s still an ambition that depends on the capabilities of quantum hardware and proving an advantage over classical computing methods. The funding is meant to give ColibriTD more time and resources to get through this stage.
