Germany Takes on US With Strongest Non-Chinese Open-Source AI Model

Germany's research consortium released Soofi S, an open-source large language model (31.6B parameters, 3.2B active) trained on 27 trillion tokens with emphasis on German and English, claiming best-in-class performance against open competitors and positioning it as Europe's sovereign AI alternative to US and Chinese models. If you're building an LLM product for European enterprise or public sector, you now have a competitive open-source foundation trained on sovereign infrastructure that outperforms comparable open models—no licensing lock-in to US vendors. The move signals that Mixture-of-Experts is table-stakes for competitive open models, and German language performance is a real moat in a market of 130 million speakers.