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The “Steinäcker” area, in the north of Heilbronn and south of the A6. To the west, on the other side of Grundäckerstrasse, is Fleischwaren Heilbronn, one of the largest meat processing plants for the Schwarz Group, owner of Kaufland and Lidl. To the east, the Neckar River and the city’s thermal power plant. From Grundäckerstrasse, tractors and seeders turn towards the nearby fields. The area was and still is predominantly used for agriculture, but now 23 hectares – the equivalent of about 42 football fields – have been cleared of vegetation to prepare the construction site. On a fence, the typical announcement: “This is where IPAI is built”. The sequel, perhaps, more atypical and as ambitious as possible: “The future Silicon Valley of Europe”.

Today, when there is only arable land there, it may seem difficult to understand. If we repeat the story in 15 or 20 years, it will be something else entirely. IPAI (Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence) Heilbronn is the most ambitious research and development project in Artificial Intelligence in Europe. The initiators – a public-private consortium consisting of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation (the Schwarz Gruppe owns Lidl and Kaufland), which is also the main funder of the project, the Schwarz Group, the Regional Government of Baden-Württemberg and the municipality of Heilbronn – are aware that Europe has lost its start in the “AI race” with the US and China. But they are equally aware that our “Old Lady” cannot remain passive and watch helplessly as others gain momentum. “Have you ever thought about what happens to your data that you left on the internet when placing orders or subscribing to newsletters? Have you thought that your data stays in datacenters overseas and could be used in ways without you being able to do anything against?”, said the guide in Heilbronn.

The IPAI Campus

The construction site is one thing, the institution is another. The latter already exists, and research has started. Heilbronn is attracting young AI researchers from all over Europe. For those who still believe that Artificial Intelligence means ChatGPT and Large Language Models, a guided tour of IPAI Spaces, a building of work offices and test spaces used until the campus is ready, is highly recommended. Appointments for guided tours can be simply made over the internet, just like at museums. Here, at IPAI, we talk about a “museum” of Artificial Intelligence applications in various industries and sectors of activity, from logistics to commerce, archaeology, medicine and automotive. Participants can even “play” with some technologies. IPAI works as an accelerator for digital innovations based on Artificial Intelligence. More than 130 large companies such as Audi, Porsche, Schaeffler or Vodafone are present in Heilbronn for research, and will transfer innovations from there to the production plants. And keep in mind that the large campus on Grundäckerstrasse is currently just a construction site. We are talking here about the presence of companies in Heilbronn in other spaces that the foundation has built for research and development, mainly in IPAI Spaces in Wohlgelegen, a former industrial area converted into an ultra-modern mini-campus, and then converging on the new campus.

Fun fact to understand better: the Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences (HHN) already owns an ultra-modern campus, built by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation. In the meantime, the patron founder has decided that with the development of the AI campus, it must also expand the university campus to support technology transfers between academia and the professional environment. Since the university campus is located in the city centre and space is limited, in order to be able to keep everything together, the Dieter Schwarz Foundation is demolishing the current ice hockey rink in Heilbronn (Eisstadion am Europaplatz, home of the Heilbronner Falken, currently playing in the German second ice hockey division) to make way for new buildings with classrooms, laboratories and libraries. The expanded campus will integrate major new faculties, including leading academic partnerships such as the one with ETH Zürich or the Technical University of Munich (TUM). A new, modern ice rink will be built by the Foundation in another area of the city.

But not only large companies, but also small or medium-sized ones, start-ups, entrepreneurs, PhD students or researchers are present there in what, little by little, is coming together in a hub of digital innovations. The Dieter Schwarz Foundation allocates more than €100 million annually only to digital research and education in Heilbronn.

Schwarz Digits and Digital Sovereignty

If the campus means buildings, you also need an engine to move the whole project. And that’s Schwarz Digits. Schwarz Digits inaugurated in July 2026 a huge Schwarz Digits Campus in Bad Friedrichshall (just a few kilometers from Heilbronn), a 15.5-hectare hub that houses more than 3,500 IT specialists (with a capacity to expand to 5,500), while the institution itself currently has around 8,000 employees spread across the region, and growth will continue to accelerate. Schwarz Digits’ role is to directly connect the thousands of students and researchers at Bildungscampus Heilbronn with the job market and real technology projects. And the motto behind it, the one driving all these massive investments in Heilbronn, is digital sovereignty.

The role is to migrate data to European data centers and reduce dependence on US tech giants (such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) or China. This concept of Europe’s digital sovereignty vis-à-vis the US or China is one of the boldest strategic and economic moves in Europe and is just beginning.

Why this desire for digital sovereignty? Because US CLOUD Act allows US authorities to force any tech company based in America to provide access to its users’ data, no matter where the servers are physically located (even if they are in Germany or Romania). In other words, European consumers’ data (i.e., even when buying or paying digitally) ends up on servers in the US and can be accessed there by large tech companies without the consent of those from whom the data stems and without us knowing that this has happened. Migrating the data of European citizens and companies to European servers is an extra safety measure, especially now that AI models need enormous amounts of data to be “fed” and trained. And, given that at the moment the supremacy of AI belongs to the US, we probably do not want algorithms to be fed precisely with our private data.

From Farm to Digital... Farm

Schwarz Digits has started the construction of a megadatacenter on the site of the former power plant in Lübbenau (south of Berlin), for which it has allocated no more and no less than 11 billion euros. It does not mean that data will disappear completely from US servers, and not even so quickly, but, at least in the first phase, the goal is for critical data, government infrastructure, industrial secrets and AI systems to be moved at an accelerated pace to datacenters owned and operated 100% in Europe.

Meanwhile, the city of Heilbronn is undergoing a radical urban and economic metamorphosis, being transformed from a city known for viticulture into the undeclared capital of Artificial Intelligence and sovereign technology in Europe. For now, it is a big construction site, just like European digital initiatives. The next two decades will wipe the construction site dust off the digital sovereignty picture, and then it will be clearer what is just happening and being built now.

For the moment, tractors are still ploughing in the Steinäcker area. However, the farms of the future will be digital datafarms.