The name “Dieter Schwarz” may not sound familiar to you right away, but if we talk about Lidl, things change. Well, Dieter Schwarz is the head of the family emporium of Lidl and Kaufland. And it is normal that neither the name nor the face is familiar to you, because the “German Juan Roig” He is extremely jealous of his privacy in a globalized and permanently connected world like the one we live in thanks to big tech like Google, Meta or Amazon.
Precisely at that table is where the group wants to sit. Schwarz Digitsits technological side responsible until now for the IT of the almost 15,000 supermarkets that the chain has around the world. As synthesize Bernd Wagner, their sales manager: “If you don’t sit at the table, you end up being part of the menu.”
From the supermarket to the cloud. It seems like a huge leap because in fact it is, but the Schwarz have been making their first steps for years. In 2018 they began developing their own internal cloud (called Stackit) to manage the critical infrastructure of its supermarkets independently. In 2021 they acquired the Israeli cybersecurity company XM Cyber for about $700 million. In 2023 the group announced the creation of Schwarz Digits combining the cloud, cybersecurity and e-commerce and at that time they already had 7,500 people on staff.
Originally this infrastructure was designed for internal use, but the next step has been to open it to external clients. A specific type of client: who seeks digital sovereignty. Companies and public institutions that want to process their data exclusively in Europe, with high standards of data protection and legal control. And now has important clientssuch as the government of the Netherlands, some German ministries, the KPN telecom or the Dutch Central Bank.
Why is it important. This step forward comes at a time when Europe is missing the boat on artificial intelligence and the United States, the official supplier of the old continent, is converting its most valuable asset (the most advanced AI models) into export technology subject to controls, such as we have already seen with Claude Mythos. In fact, the CEO of Mistral has already warned that Europe only has two years to catch up if it does not want to be a vassal. In short, Europe has to put the turbo in models, but also chips and infrastructure such as data centers. And it’s in it.
The institutional plan is ambitious and considers private collaboration as essential, but the fact that it is one of the largest retailers in Europe and not a newly arrived startup provides a plus: own capital on a large scale and without depending on external investors, as Stackit herself emphasizes by presenting itself as a company “without external shareholder interests, without changes in ownership.”
Context. Currently, three American companies hold 70% of the European cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy datacompared to a paltry 15% from European suppliers. In short: the market that Stackit is targeting is succulent and its room for growth is enormous. And your work in the old continent and the country that has historically been the engine of Europe, more than welcome: in the words of the German Minister of DigitalizationKarsten Wildberger: “Germany needs processing capacity if it wants to compete in the first division in artificial intelligence.”
In detail. Today Stackit manages several data centers in Germany and Austria and has relevant alliances: it hosts models from the German AI firm Aleph Alpha (where the Schwarz group has invested) and has a system called AuditGPT that uses Deutsche Bahn. Additionally, Google Workspace has been hosted since 2024 in data centers operated by Schwarz.
Its most visible upcoming project is the Lübbenau data center, built on a former lignite thermal power plant. With 11 billion euros of investment and a first phase planned for the end of 2027, it is designed to work with renewable energy and will have the capacity to house 100,000 GPUs.
Yes, but. Although the vision and business and industrial capacity of the Schwarz Group is beyond doubt, the big bet of the richest man in Germany is a complicated adventure because it has hyperscalers such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft in front of it, which implies economic muscle at another level, decades of advantage in software and technological experience that the German company does not yet have.
Furthermore, American big tech companies are not willing to give up ground on the old continent: in November 2025 Google announced a €5.5 billion investment in Germany, including a new data center in Dietzenbach. And although digital sovereignty is a very strong claim, Stackit still depends on open source technologies and partners like CrowdStrike or Aleph Alpha for its catalog of services, so it is more aspirational than a reality.
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Cover | Xataka with Magnific
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