Common Questions

What is STACKIT and who built it?

STACKIT is the sovereign cloud platform of the Schwarz Group (parent of Lidl and Kaufland), built from the group's internal IT infrastructure and launched commercially in 2021.Source: Background

Is STACKIT a GDPR-compliant cloud?

Yes. STACKIT operates German data centres and targets public sector and enterprise customers who need GDPR-compliant cloud services outside the AWS/Azure/GCP oligopoly.Source: Background

What services does STACKIT offer?

STACKIT provides object storage, compute, Kubernetes, and AI-as-a-service offerings, targeting German Mittelstand companies and public bodies needing sovereign infrastructure.Source: Background

Background

STACKIT is the sovereign cloud platform of the Schwarz Group, built to provide European public sector and enterprise customers with cloud infrastructure, managed services, and AI tooling that complies with German and EU data sovereignty requirements. Developed from Schwarz Group's internal IT infrastructure, it went to market in 2021. In April 2026, STACKIT won a SEAL-3 slot in the European Commission's €180m, six-year sovereign cloud framework, placing it alongside OVHcloud's Post Telecom consortium and Scaleway as one of three fully European-owned awardees .

Schwarz Group, the parent of Lidl and Kaufland, invested in STACKIT as a strategic infrastructure play rather than a profit centre. Its retail operations generate an estimated €130+ billion annually, giving it the capital to fund cloud infrastructure without external investors. STACKIT operates data centres in Germany and provides object storage, compute, Kubernetes, and AI-as-a-service offerings, targeting German Mittelstand companies and public bodies that need GDPR-compliant cloud services outside the AWS/Azure/GCP oligopoly.

STACKIT now occupies the cloud leg of what analysts describe as Schwarz Group's private-sector sovereignty triangle: cloud infrastructure (STACKIT) plus AI model capability (via the merged Cohere-Aleph Alpha entity, in which Schwarz Group invested $600 million as anchor investor in the $20bn deal) plus retail demand at scale (Lidl and Kaufland workloads) . Berlin's sovereignty conditions on the merger, which require AI development to remain in Germany and infrastructure sovereignty to be maintained , would effectively make STACKIT the mandatory deployment platform for the merged AI entity if enforced.