Deutsche Telekom has found a practical answer to a tricky sovereignty question: how do you serve many customers from one GPU fleet while keeping each one isolated? At the European leg of Nvidia’s GTC event in Berlin, the carrier revealed a partnership with Nvidia and San Francisco-based vCluster Labs. The idea is to give each tenant a private AI cloud on a shared platform.
The pieces fit together in layers. Nvidia’s open source DSX OS software, which helps design, simulate and run AI infrastructure stacks, forms the foundation. vCluster then gives every tenant a dedicated control plane, whether they run Kubernetes, Slurm or wider inference clusters. The three companies designed the architecture, and it sits at the center of Deutsche Telekom’s Nvidia-backed AI factory, which went live in February. Next, Deutsche Telekom plans to extend it into a cloud that serves German industry at scale.
Andreas Falkner, who heads industrial AI cloud at Deutsche Telekom, says vCluster orchestrates the Nvidia DSX stack so each customer gets a private AI cloud spanning every GPU generation the carrier runs. For buyers, that matters because an isolated control plane limits what neighbors can see or touch.
vCluster is the lesser-known name here. Formerly Loft Labs, it was co-founded by Lukas Gentele and SAP alumnus Fabian Kramm, whose earlier startup DevSpace built open source Kubernetes tools. The company already counts Adobe, Samsung and Deloitte as customers, along with AI infrastructure players such as Groq, Firmus and Nebius. Gentele notes that Deutsche Telekom’s cloud is where DSX OS first reached production at scale, automated end to end, and he says any Nvidia Cloud Partner could follow the same path.
Numbers show the ambition. An unnamed German automaker is the first private sovereign AI cloud customer, with more industrial clients expected. To serve them, Deutsche Telekom expects to grow its vCluster-supported Nvidia GPUs from 500 today to more than 10,000.
The move also fits a wider strategy. The carrier has teamed up with Cloudflare for connectivity and security and launched an AI-driven cloud migration service, all while positioning itself as a European alternative to US hyperscalers.
Sovereignty claims deserve scrutiny, though. Isolation helps, yet buyers will still want details on administrative access and legal jurisdiction. A private control plane answers one question and leaves others open.
