French computing firm Bull and Schwarz Digits, the digital arm of Germany’s Schwarz Group, have signed an agreement to build a sovereign European AI and cloud infrastructure stack. The companies announced the memorandum of understanding on Tuesday in Berlin at the German government’s 2026 Digital Summit.
Key points
- Bull and Schwarz Digits will combine hardware manufacturing and cloud platforms to build an independent computing stack for European enterprises.
- Servers using direct liquid cooling will be manufactured at Bull’s Angers facility in western France.
- The BullSequana AI platform will be offered directly through Schwarz Digits’ STACKIT marketplace for corporate and public-sector buyers.
- The alliance targets regulated industries requiring data to stay strictly under European legal jurisdiction.
A full stack from servers to software
The Franco-German agreement covers the entire computing pipeline, from physical server racks to enterprise applications. Schwarz Digits, which grew out of the retail conglomerate behind the Lidl and Kaufland supermarket networks, provides the cloud environment through its STACKIT division. Bull, which generates around €720m in annual revenue and employs 3,000 workers across 32 countries, will supply high-performance computing hardware and system design.
Hardware production will centre on Bull’s manufacturing plant in Angers, France. The site builds rack-scale AI machinery and will produce systems fitted with Bull’s direct liquid cooling technology. Liquid cooling has become an operational requirement for modern AI clusters as chip power densities rise and data centres face tighter energy limits across Europe.
The joint project aims to give European companies an alternative to American hyperscalers, particularly in sectors where cross-border data transfers create regulatory risks. As European organisations evaluate rising cloud costs and regulatory exposure, similar sovereign infrastructure projects have surfaced globally, including an initiative where South Korea committed 21.3tn won to sovereign technology.
Supercomputing roots and software distribution
Bull brings experience from top-tier research systems to the venture. In June, Bull’s systems took the top three positions in the Green500 ranking of energy-efficient supercomputers, the company said. The French vendor also built the JUPITER exascale system hosted in Germany, which ranks as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe.
Under the new agreement, Bull’s BullSequana AI platform will be distributed through the STACKIT Marketplace. This arrangement allows European public-sector bodies and private enterprises to deploy Bull’s AI systems on top of STACKIT’s hosted cloud services without routing workloads through non-European providers.
“Together, we demonstrate that Europe can deliver high-performance innovation entirely on its own terms,” said Bernie Wagner, chief revenue officer of Schwarz Digits. Emmanuel Le Roux, chief executive of Bull, Bull said in a statement, described the move as part of a push toward a “resilient and competitive European ecosystem.”
Open hardware and quantum computing plans
Beyond immediate distribution of existing hardware, the two companies agreed to develop custom server architectures. Their road map includes co-designing server hardware aligned with Open Compute Project standards, an open hardware framework that allows data centres to deploy modular, energy-efficient racks.
The partnership will also target enterprise software integration, specifically connecting the infrastructure stack with SAP RISE deployments. SAP remains the primary enterprise resource planning software across Germany’s industrial heartland, making dedicated local hosting a priority for corporate IT departments seeking to run AI workloads over internal operational data.
Longer-term plans laid out in the memorandum include large-scale high-performance computing programmes and early work on quantum computing integration. Bull has maintained an active quantum emulation and computing development division, while Schwarz Digits has been expanding its enterprise cloud offerings to handle specialised computational tasks.
Political backing for European independence
The announcement follows sustained political calls across the European Union for greater digital autonomy. The timing coincided with the German government’s 2026 Digital Summit, coming one day after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that Germany and the wider European continent must accelerate the domestic development of AI capabilities.
European policymakers and business leaders have voiced growing concern over dependence on US-based cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Even as American technology firms turn to European capital markets, seen in how an Alphabet euro bond sale tested European debt appetite for data centre expansion, local leaders want domestic infrastructure that operates strictly under EU privacy rules and sovereignty requirements.
Bull and Schwarz Digits have not yet disclosed the exact financial terms or an operational deployment date for the first co-designed Open Compute Project systems. The companies intend to finalise technical specifications in technical working groups following the summit.
