Germany needs an AI-first doctrine

Aleph Alpha (a German AI company based in Heidelberg) is merging with the Canadian provider Cohere. Business circles see this as a clever move. I read it as a political wake-up call: Germany is falling behind while sitting on a treasure it refuses to dig up.

It’s the same old story. Tomorrow’s technology comes out of our universities and research institutes. The MP3, the computer, the maglev train, the car, the foundations of artificial intelligence: the breakthrough ideas came from Germany. Researchers at TU Munich (the Technical University of Munich) laid important foundations of today’s language models back in the early 1990s.

Others reaped the harvest. Ten years later, the US and China are earning trillions from our ideas while we argue about GDPR at home. That has to stop. In technology, Germany needs a genuine “Germany First” policy.

Billions are a matter of priorities

People often say there’s no money for this. Let’s look at the numbers. Every year we pour hundreds of billions into a deadlocked migration policy and a stumbling energy transition. Anyone who then claims we can’t find €5–10 billion for digital sovereignty is not telling the truth.

These sums buy us our ticket to the future. Bad policy has destroyed the old success model of “Germany Inc.”, built on mechanical engineering, chemicals and the combustion engine. AI now gives us a historic opportunity to start again from scratch.

Picture a public administration with no mountains of forms and no federal tangle of responsibilities, working in real time with AI and automation. Picture our chemical and pharmaceutical groups running calculations on national supercomputers and developing medicines in weeks rather than decades. And our agricultural machinery makers sending autonomous tractors into the fields, powered by specialised AI models “Made in Germany”.

With AI, Germany can get back to the top: in medicine, agriculture, robotics and many other sectors.

What Germany already has in tech

Why do we let people tell us we lack the companies for this? Germany has first-class firms that are only waiting for a national strategy:

• big names such as SAP, Datev (whose software most German tax advisers use) and Software AG
• specialists such as Nextcloud, OpenSUSE, Softmaker and n8n
• security firms such as G Data, Avira and Teamviewer
• young drivers such as Personio or Adesso

Where is the national consortium? Why is there no government mandate that bundles these forces into our own package of operating system, cloud, office software and AI models? Germany has the second-largest number of data centres in the world. Let’s turn them into fortresses for our own data.

Copy the master until you become one

On the large foundation models, we have lost touch for now. So let’s reach for the strongest tools available. China releases one powerful open-source model after another. Let’s take them. China did exactly the same with Western technology for decades.

Open source gives us this option: we check the code, secure it, adapt it and build our German house on top of it.

The courage to start again

Anyone who says “carry on as before” is leading the country into irrelevance. We now need the political courage to free ourselves from shifting coalitions, cabinets and small-mindedness.

Whether this country survives economically depends on AI, quantum computing and robotics. They are the last chance for our prosperity.

In ten years, Germany can again be the technological world power it used to be. For that, we have to want it and finally get to work.

This article is an opinion piece. In our projects we put digital sovereignty into practice: with open standards, GDPR-compliant infrastructure in German data centres and solutions that make our clients independent rather than tying them to US platforms.

We’re happy to discuss what this could look like in your business in an initial consultation.