MUNICH. Bavaria’s Minister of Science Markus Blume described today’s signing of a contract for the delivery of high-performance processors from NVIDIA, the world’s leading manufacturer of AI infrastructure, at the Bavarian Ministry of Science in Munich as a “big day for AI in Bavaria and a milestone for science and research in Bavaria and Germany.” The Free State is thus launching the next phase of its AI initiative: It is massively expanding computing power for science and research, thereby creating the conditions for the development of the Blue Swan Platform, a proprietary, trustworthy platform comprising AI models with a wide range of capabilities and applications. The foundation for this is a new generation of high-performance computers, the procurement of which was contractually initiated today.

Blume highlighted Bavaria’s strong vision: “These new GPUs are not an end in themselves, but are intended to bring AI into practical use. With our Blue Swan platform, we are developing a standalone AI foundation model for key application areas such as healthcare and robotics—a model that does not yet exist in this form. The Blue Swan platform is designed around capabilities, is multimodal, and follows the principles of open source. That is why we also want to invite others to contribute here.”

Blume highlighted Bavaria’s strong vision: “These new GPUs are not an end in themselves, but are intended to bring AI into practical use. With our Blue Swan platform, we are developing a standalone AI base model for key application areas such as healthcare and robotics—a model that does not yet exist in this form. The Blue Swan platform is designed around capabilities, is multimodal, and follows the principles of open source. That is why we also want to invite others to contribute to this effort.”

Rod Evans, NVIDIA Vice President of Supercomputing, Higher Education & AI, EMEA, explained: “Bavaria is a true powerhouse across Europe when it comes to AI activities. I am delighted that we are sealing this partnership today and thereby taking the next major step together for the AI ecosystem and, consequently, for science and research in Bavaria and Germany. This will make Bavaria an AI leader, as the state has long demonstrated through its High-Tech Agenda Bavaria that there is a genuine commitment to progress and the further development of AI here. That’s what I call true forward-thinking, because the demand for computing power is growing steadily—and science and research must not fall behind.”

With today’s signing of the agreement, the computing infrastructure for the AI foundation model will be significantly expanded: Starting in the fall of 2026, the development teams for the Blue Swan platform will have exclusive access to this vastly expanded computing capacity and will be able to advance their research. The powerful cluster, equipped with NVIDIA’s new high-performance processors, is being built at the National High-Performance Computing Center Erlangen (NHR) at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) under the direction of Prof. Gerhard Wellein. The technical implementation is being carried out in collaboration with partner Megware.

Minister of Science Markus Blume stated: “We are combining the best ideas from our AI scientists with the best infrastructure and investing 54.5 million euros in this alone—more than any other federal state! In total, this means that in the future, the Erlangen High-Performance Computing Center alone will have around 1,400 GPUs available for the new Bavarian AI base model—with the potential to reach up to 1,700 in the future. This makes FAU home to the largest AI computing infrastructure in the German higher education landscape.”