On 11 July 2025, the Schwarz Group—owner of Lidl and Kaufland—formally submitted a proposal to the German federal government to host one of Europe’s flagship Artificial Intelligence “Gigafactories” under the €20 billion EU-backed Invest AI Initiative. The group plans to build a hyperscale data center in Lübbenau, roughly 90 km south of Berlin. The proposed facility will span 13 hectares and support up to 200 megawatts of power capacity. It is designed to house as many as 100,000 AI chips, making it one of the largest such installations in Europe.
The data center will be operated by STACKIT, Schwarz Group’s cloud and infrastructure subsidiary, launched in 2022. STACKIT will use the site to power both internal Schwarz Group digital operations and external AI workloads for enterprise clients. If approved, the project would position Schwarz Group as a major player in Europe’s AI and cloud computing landscape, while also supporting Germany’s push for technological sovereignty.
