Schwarz Group expands data centers in Germany to increase national resilience and independence

The Schwarz Group from Neckarsulm is focusing on the further expansion of data centers in Germany to increase the independence and resilience of the entire republic. "We need computing capacity in this country to run AI models," said Schwarz Boss Gerd Chrzanowski to Focus. While the data centers are needed for themselves, they are also willing to open up to other customers for whom sovereignty and survival capacity in a crisis are important.

The Schwarz Group, which includes Lidl and Kaufland, has already announced two major projects in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg, where alone 16.6 billion euros are planned to be invested in the coming years. Chrzanowski apparently has no fear of investing money blindly. "The era of concrete implementation for us is just beginning," he said. "An exciting time."

The company, which generates an annual global revenue of nearly 190 billion euros, is trying to compete with US competitors like Amazon or Microsoft by offering its own cloud solution called Stackit Paroli, which some critics have so far not been convinced by. "I partially agree with the critics," said Chrzanowski. While they are performing excellently and are fully on schedule, they have not yet reached the place they want to be. Nevertheless, they are a leader in sovereign data clouds across Europe in this area. The others started 25 years earlier, but they are not sovereign in the European sense.