The grocer
and the cloud.

The cash engine

The grocery business pays for the cloud business. The companies of Schwarz Group reported EUR 185.6bn of revenue for the year to end February 2026, up 5.8 percent from EUR 175.4bn, across 604,000 employees, 217,000 of them in Germany ¹. Lidl store revenue was EUR 140.2bn, up 6.1 percent; Kaufland EUR 36.7bn, up 4.3 percent; Schwarz Produktion EUR 5.7bn, up 23.9 percent; PreZero EUR 4.1bn; Schwarz Digits, the IT arm, EUR 2.2bn, up 15.8 percent. Those add to EUR 188.9bn against a stated EUR 185.6bn, and the group does not reconcile the EUR 3.3bn gap.

Store revenue is a gross retail measure. For the prior year the group reported Lidl store revenue of EUR 132.1bn while the audited accounts report Umsatzerlöse of EUR 94,727m, a gap of about EUR 37.4bn, or 39.5 percent, unreconciled ⁴⁰⁴¹.

Audited Lidl: revenue EUR 94,727m, up 6.9 percent; net profit EUR 2,281m, up 21.7 percent; capex EUR 3,764m; net financial debt down from EUR 12,477m to EUR 9,941m. Kaufland: revenue EUR 32,928m, up 3.2 percent; EBIT EUR 600m, down 7.4 percent; net profit EUR 265m, down 31.7 percent; management blames maintenance and collective wage settlements ⁴².

Group investment was about EUR 9bn in FY2025, EUR 3.7bn in Germany, with more than EUR 10bn planned for FY2026, about EUR 5bn in Germany.

No shareholders, no quarterly clock

No audited consolidated Schwarz Gruppe account is public. Lidl Stiftung & Co. KG (Amtsgericht Stuttgart HRA 102314) and Kaufland Stiftung & Co. KG (HRA 102851) each file their own top-level Konzernabschluss under the Publizitätsgesetz. There is no audited group-level profit, cash flow, net debt or capex figure. The EUR 185.6bn is a management aggregate.

Lidl received a qualified opinion for the year to 28 February 2025, sole basis: no disclosure of governing-body remuneration under section 314(1)(6a) HGB. Kaufland's is clean ⁴³.

Ownership is unconfirmed. As reported, Dieter Schwarz transferred 99.9 percent of shares to the Dieter Schwarz Stiftung, with 100 percent of voting rights at Schwarz Unternehmenstreuhand KG. The claim traces to Handelsblatt via German Wikipedia; check handelsregister.de.

The foundation put EUR 50m into IPAI, matched by EUR 50m from Baden-Württemberg ⁴⁴. That is not Schwarz Digits capex.

Gerd Chrzanowski took the general partner mandate on 1 December 2021 and is quoted in the 11 June 2026 results release.

It built the cloud for itself before it sold it

STACKIT was built in 2018 for Schwarz IT's own use, launched externally in 2022, and became its own legal entity in 2024.

Schwarz Digits was created on 29 September 2023 as the group's fifth division, about 7,500 employees across eight units including Schwarz IT, STACKIT, XM Cyber and the Lidl and Kaufland e-commerce arms. XM Cyber cost USD 700m in November 2021. Co-CEO Christian Müller said the group offers IT solutions to third parties only once they are stable in its own infrastructure.

The EUR 2.2bn figure covers the whole division. Lidl and Kaufland online revenue alone was EUR 1.7bn in FY2025, flat year on year ¹. No STACKIT-only revenue appears in any Schwarz release.

The one audited filing, Schwarz Digits KG for 1 March 2023 to 29 February 2024, shows revenue EUR 323.4m, EBIT minus EUR 253.2m, net loss EUR 282.5m, funded intra-group.

What STACKIT actually ships today

STACKIT's documentation lists roughly 35 named services across about ten categories, from Kubernetes and managed PostgreSQL to object storage and AI model serving ⁴⁵. Against AWS, Azure and Google Cloud it lacks depth, global regions and GPU fleet; our assessment, unsourced.

It publishes two regions, eu01 in Germany and eu02 in Austria, and three data centres: DC01 Neckarsulm, DC08 Ellhofen, DC10 Ostermiething ⁸. Lübbenau is described as its fifth data centre. Heise reported on 21 July 2026 that STACKIT operates two data centres in Baden-Württemberg. No site's IT load in megawatts is disclosed. Claims of roughly 120 MW scaling to 1 GW by 2027 trace to no primary source.

The compute engine GPU page lists hourly pricing in eu01 from about EUR 1.74 to about EUR 64.33, up to eight GPUs per VM. The silicon is not named and fleet size is not disclosed.

STACKIT publishes twelve references ⁴⁶; two are internal schwarz workloads, keycloak and self-EDI for Lidl and Kaufland.

Inside the Lübbenau announcement

Schwarz Digits broke ground at Lübbenau on 17 November 2025, a 13 hectare brownfield site in Brandenburg reusing the grid connection of a dismantled lignite plant.

The EUR 11bn headline covers planning, construction and operations ⁴⁷, a lifecycle figure with no period attached. Vogel/maschinenmarkt splits it into roughly EUR 2.5bn for construction and the rest for IT over five to fifteen years, single-source. Group investment across all divisions for FY2026 is more than EUR 10bn ¹, so EUR 11bn on one site spans many years.

The site plans about 200 MW of initial connected load across six modules, the first three due by the end of 2027, and up to 100,000 AI GPUs at full build. No primary source names a GPU vendor.

There is no state funding, per co-CEO Christian Müller at the groundbreaking ⁴⁸. Federal digital minister Karsten Wildberger attended.

As of mid 2026 Lübbenau has zero operational capacity, with a 2027 first phase. Schwarz Digits opened its Bad Friedrichshall campus on 21 July 2026, 15.5 hectares. One account gives it room for up to 5,500 employees, another about 3,500.

The AI gigafactory bid

No consortium has been selected for an EU AI gigafactory. The EuroHPC joint undertaking is expected to publish the official call in summer 2026, and construction of the first facility to begin in 2027.

A German consortium of Deutsche Telekom, IONOS, SAP, Siemens and Schwarz Gruppe fell apart over leadership and location days before the expression of interest deadline of Friday 20 June 2025 at 17:00 CEST ⁴⁹. Three parties then filed separately. By December 2025 Telekom and Schwarz were reported in advanced bilateral talks, with Brookfield as a possible financier. No joint press release confirms a signed vehicle.

Telekom's Munich AI facility with Nvidia is roughly 10,000 GPUs and about EUR 1bn. Lübbenau's stated figures are up to 100,000 GPUs and EUR 11bn.

Sovereignty is becoming a procurement category

On 13 February 2026 BSI and Schwarz Digits announced a strategic partnership covering sovereign cloud for public administration, cybersecurity monitoring and handling of classified information ⁵⁰. STACKIT is implementing the VS-NfD requirements during 2026 and is seeking BSI approval to process classified information. It does not hold it.

Three spring 2026 awards, all ceilings. On 17 April 2026 the European Commission awarded up to EUR 180m over six years to four provider groups under cloud III; STACKIT scored SEAL-3. That sum is split four ways and STACKIT's share is not disclosed. The federal digital ministry's roughly EUR 250m sovereign AI platform went to T-Systems with SAP in first place and an SVA-led consortium including STACKIT in second; cio.de reported a 70/30 split, roughly EUR 175m against EUR 75m, Heise says it was not disclosed. On 29 May 2026 Govtech Deutschland awarded a multi-cloud framework of up to EUR 250m to Bechtle AG, with STACKIT in its portfolio. Confirm with both contracting bodies that these are separate procurements.

The commission's cloud and AI development act proposal of 3 June 2026 points the same way and is not yet law.

The competition, and the scale problem

AWS launched a European sovereign cloud region in Brandenburg with an EUR 7.8bn investment plan ⁵¹. It is generally available now. Schwarz's Brandenburg site's first phase is due at the end of 2027.

AWS reported USD 128.7bn of segment revenue for full-year 2025, up 20 percent, and Amazon flagged capex of roughly USD 200bn. Schwarz Digits' EUR 2.2bn division is under 2 percent of AWS alone.

Synergy research found in July 2025 that European providers hold about 15 percent of their home market, down from about 29 percent in 2017. The three US hyperscalers hold about 70 percent; STACKIT is not named. US leaders invest around EUR 10bn per quarter in European infrastructure, against Lübbenau's EUR 11bn spread over years.

Delos cloud, an SAP subsidiary reselling Microsoft Azure to German administration, ramps to production from 2026. Deutsche Telekom won the federal AI platform ahead of the Schwarz-backed consortium. The merged Cohere and Aleph Alpha entity would run on STACKIT; the deal has not closed.

Execution risk

Schwarz Digits announced on 10 July 2026 that Rolf Schumann is leaving by mutual agreement, effective immediately, with Christian Müller assuming sole overall responsibility ⁵⁰. No successor, no reason given. Schumann fronted the gigafactory push and the Lübbenau groundbreaking.

The commission's cloud sovereignty scale runs SEAL-0 to SEAL-4, which requires a full EU supply chain from chips to software. In the April 2026 award the highest any winner reached was SEAL-3, STACKIT included. STACKIT's GPU page does not name the silicon, and no Nvidia agreement has been announced for the up to 100,000 GPUs planned at Lübbenau.

On 24 April 2026 Cohere of Toronto and Aleph Alpha announced a merger, Schwarz leading Cohere's series E. Schwarz Digits calls it a EUR 500m, approximately USD 600m, structured financing commitment; CNBC reported USD 600m at a combined valuation of roughly USD 20bn. The deal is pending.

No STACKIT revenue figure, no megawatt figure, no GPU fleet size, no audited consolidated group account, and a qualified audit opinion at Lidl.

How a grocer became a cloud provider

What would have to be true

Sources

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