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You know the saying: If you don’t know what to do, form a working group? I thought about that this week as the federal government’s long-awaited digital sovereignty summit took place in Berlin.
On the one hand, much of what was announced there sounds quite concrete: German and French companies want to invest a total of twelve billion euros to promote technological independence from the United States and China. And: French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced 18 AI partnerships there that revolve around the development and application of artificial intelligence. Among others, French AI startup Mistral and German software manufacturer SAP will collaborate more closely.
But on the other hand, it was mostly an announcement. And the money appears to come entirely from the economy. In contrast, the German and French governments are setting up task forces on digital sovereignty.
Here’s what you need to know: Schwarz Group is investing eleven billion euros in new data centers
The Schwarz Group’s new data center will be built on approximately 13 hectares of land in Lübbenau on the Spreewald. Parent company Lidl and Kaufland wants to invest eleven billion euros in this – the largest single investment in the company’s history to date. The data center is expected to be ready in two years and will accommodate up to 100,000 chips. At the groundbreaking this week: Federal Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU). “Germany needs computing power if we want to play in the top league in artificial intelligence,” Wildberger said.
All this may make one person a bit nervous: the head of Swedish payments services provider Klarna, Sebastian Siemiatkowski. He was originally an enthusiastic supporter of AI, but now he says: It takes less computing power to operate advanced AI than technology companies currently invest in data centers. That’s what he told him Financial Times.
Siemiatkowski also owns the chip maker
Nvidia because it is considered excessive. He is not alone in this. This week it also became known that Japanese company Softbank and Peter Thiel’s fund had sold Nvidia shares.
But so far, the world’s most valuable company is still performing brilliantly. The quarterly numbers Nvidia presented on Wednesday far exceeded many investors’ expectations – and thus reduced concerns of an AI bubble. Nvidia’s sales rose by 62 percent in the third quarter and sales in the coming quarter are expected to be higher than previously estimated. This means the AI boom in stock markets is entering its next chapter, reports my colleague Victor Gojdka.
Here’s what you should be thinking about: the dual AI problem on Wikipedia
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the most important sources of facts on the Internet. However: Wikipedia readership is declining, perhaps because people are asking for ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity more often.
These bots may also be trained with text from Wikipedia. One indication is that the number of automatic accesses has increased significantly. The fact that the texts in the encyclopedia are freely available may ultimately help reduce Wikipedia’s readership.
And at the same time, Wikipedia has other AI problems. My colleague Omid Rezaee reported this week that artificially generated — and sometimes fake — texts are appearing there more and more frequently. He writes: According to one study, five percent of new English-language content now contains AI content.
Among other things, non-existent books can be found as sources in the article. But it took a while before it was discovered, because at first the information sounded reasonable: the author really existed, he had even published on the topic in question, but the book title and ISBN were made up. Typical AI hallucination.
You can try this: Gemini 3
Google introduced a new generation of its AI this week. Gemini 3 is highly anticipated and comes at a time when things are going well for Google in terms of AI, as analyzed by my colleagues Jakob von Lindern and Henrik Oerding.
Gemini 3 will play a role in many Google products, including the search engine. You can try it in the Gemini app or in Google’s AI Studio test environment.
A colleague there had a small quiz app programmed for testing purposes. Since his kids are currently interested in Asterix comics, the question revolves around the Gauls and Romans: Did the Druids really cut their mistletoe with golden sickles back then? Was it true that there were traffic jams in the Gallic city of Lutetia 2,000 years ago?
It works well and fast. However, sometimes it is no longer easy to decide whether one AI model is better than another. He was also able to create such a quiz using GPT-5.1 from OpenAI. In terms of content, both language models were able to complete the task with confidence. Visually, I think the Gemini quiz app has the edge. Here, theme-appropriate animated emojis even appear in the image and look more kid-friendly and overall comic-like – one of the rare cases where the use of the Comic Sans font is a plus.
