December 11, 2025
When people talk about cloud computing today, most immediately think of the big names from the United States. Yet while AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate the market, a serious counterproposal is taking shape in Europe. At the forefront: Stackit, the cloud provider of the Schwarz Group.
Stackit's story begins where you might not initially expect it – in the IT basement of Lidl and Kaufland. What started in 2021 as an internal project to digitalize the company's own retail infrastructure developed surprisingly quickly into a serious cloud offering for external customers. The Schwarz Group already had impressive IT capabilities: 14,200 stores with networked systems and 23,000 servers in operation. This base load formed the foundation for something bigger.
Today, just a few years later, Stackit operates several high-performance data centers in Germany and Austria with around 2,000 physical servers and approximately 300,000 CPU cores. The customer list reads quite respectably: SAP uses the platform for "RISE with SAP," FC Bayern Munich entrusts its digital infrastructure to Stackit, and the Port of Hamburg has built its cloud strategy on it.
What's truly remarkable is currently happening in Lübbenau, Brandenburg. There, the Schwarz Group is investing approximately 11 billion euros in a mega data center that dwarfs all previous European projects. Six modular buildings with a connection capacity of 200 megawatts are scheduled to be completed by 2027 – designed for up to 100,000 GPUs of the latest generation. For comparison: the recently announced AI data center by Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia in Munich plans for around 10,000 GPUs.
These dimensions clearly show that Stackit is not conceived as a European niche project, but as a serious attempt to compete in the game of global cloud giants. Particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, the company is positioning itself as a future European hyperscaler.
While AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud together control about 72 percent of the European cloud infrastructure market, Stackit is betting on a different horse: digital sovereignty. All customer data resides exclusively in data centers in Germany and Austria. This initially sounds like a technical detail, but it has far-reaching consequences. This data is subject only to European law – GDPR, German Federal Data Protection Act, and other EU regulations – but not to the American CLOUD Act, which theoretically grants US authorities access to data from American companies, even when stored on European servers.
For banks, insurance companies, healthcare institutions, and public administrations, this is no trivial argument. Data protection and compliance requirements are becoming stricter, not looser. Stackit recognized this early and aligned its entire infrastructure accordingly. The company fulfills the demanding BSI C5 audit with Type 2 attestation – one of the highest German cloud security standards – and is ISO/IEC 27001 certified. IT-Grundschutz certification is also on the agenda.
Technically, Stackit is based on OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform. This decision for open standards is deliberately chosen and part of the strategy. Customers should not fall into vendor lock-in, as is often unavoidable with proprietary systems. The Stackit Kubernetes Engine enables modern container orchestration, and the focus on confidential computing – highly secure encryption even during data processing – shows where the priorities lie.
An interesting detail: Stackit certainly works with global tech giants, but on its own terms. In 2024, the company closed a partnership with Google to provide Google Workspace for European customers. The key point: all data storage, including encrypted backups, remains in Stackit data centers in the EU; even Google has no access to the encryption keys. This is how global software and European data sovereignty can be combined.
In the AI sector, Stackit is currently massively expanding its offering. The "Stackit AI Model Serving" service enables companies to use generative AI models as a managed service – GDPR-compliant in German and European data centers. The company also relies on European partners: the Schwarz Group has a stake in the German AI startup Aleph Alpha, whose language models are available via Stackit. A first product from this, AuditGPT for AI-supported financial auditing, is already running productively at Deutsche Bahn and the Schwarz Group itself.
The GPU instances with the latest NVIDIA generations and the planned enormous training capacities in Lübbenau aim to enable European companies to train large AI models without depending on American or Chinese infrastructure. In the "DataHub Europe" initiative, Stackit is working with Deutsche Bahn to provide cross-industry datasets for legally compliant AI training.
Stackit was part of Gaia-X from the beginning, the highly publicized European project for a federated cloud infrastructure. However, Gaia-X has so far barely met the high expectations. Internal disagreements, unclear goals, and the admission of American corporations as members have prevented tangible market successes from being achieved. The European cloud market share has even continued to shrink despite Gaia-X.
Stackit is therefore taking a more pragmatic path. Instead of waiting for slowly developing consortia or public funding, the Schwarz Group is investing massive amounts of its own capital. The billions for Lübbenau come from the company's coffers, not from EU funds. This provides freedom of action and speed. At the same time, the company remains committed to Gaia-X's goals – interoperability, open standards, and avoiding vendor lock-in are central components of the offering.
The political support is considerable. In 2025, the Federal Ministry of the Interior concluded a cooperation with Stackit to develop sovereign cloud solutions for federal administration. The Digital Minister personally attended the groundbreaking ceremony in Lübbenau. For government and critical infrastructures, Stackit is increasingly being viewed as a trustworthy provider – a position that American providers must work hard to achieve in this segment.
According to forecasts, by 2030 about ten percent of the German cloud market could be accounted for by sovereign cloud offerings, corresponding to a volume of around two billion euros. Stackit is positioning itself to cover a significant portion of this segment.
Despite all ambition, one should not misjudge the circumstances. AWS holds about 30 percent of the global market share, Azure around 20 percent, Google Cloud about 13 percent. These companies have invested decades and hundreds of billions of dollars in their platforms. Their range of functions – from serverless functions to highly developed AI platforms to specialized database services – is simply overwhelming.
Stackit offers solid IaaS and PaaS services, managed databases, Kubernetes, object storage, and other core cloud services. For many enterprise applications, this is completely sufficient. Yet the virtually endless service palette of the hyperscalers with their global partner networks, attractive free-tier offerings, and huge developer communities is naturally beyond Stackit's reach. Even OVHcloud, as the largest European cloud provider with over one billion euros in revenue, still plays in a different league than the American giants.
The crucial difference, however, lies not in the range of functions but in the approach. Stackit specifically addresses European companies and institutions that place high value on data security, personal support, and compliance. The backing of the Schwarz Group conveys stability and long-term orientation. The company doesn't position itself as an all-rounder for every global use case, but as a specialized partner for regulated industries and sovereignty-conscious organizations.
Whether Stackit can actually rise to become a European cloud champion will become clear in the coming years. The investments are gigantic, the technical infrastructure is growing rapidly, and the customer list is getting longer. With the digital division Schwarz Digits, the group generated approximately 1.9 billion euros in revenue in 2024, although a large portion comes from internal IT services. The external cloud market share is still small.
What Stackit already proves, however, is this: a European alternative to the American hyperscalers is possible when a company is willing to invest massively and has staying power. The combination of retail experience, pragmatic entrepreneurship, and awareness of European requirements could prove to be a recipe for success.
For the EU digital strategy, Stackit is in any case an important building block. The company demonstrates practically how digital sovereignty, GDPR compliance, and cloud innovation can work together. Whether as a primary platform or as part of a hybrid cloud strategy – for many European organizations, Stackit offers an option that didn't exist just a few years ago.
And perhaps that's exactly the point: it's not about replacing AWS or Azure. It's about having a real choice.
