Soofi S: Europe's first industrial AI model launches for testing

The Soofi Consortium, comprising leading German research institutions and startups, has unveiled Soofi S, the first model in what is intended to be an open European AI model family. Soofi S is a 30 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained on 27 trillion tokens, with a focus on German and English language text. The model is explicitly designed to support industrial applications where control, transparency, and efficiency are essential—including technical and regulatory document processing, code generation, agentic AI systems, and company-specific applications.

The Consortium's mission centers on making powerful AI applications transparent, adaptable, and usable on sovereign infrastructure. Rather than releasing Soofi S for immediate public use, the team is conducting practical testing with industrial partners to refine and validate the model in real-world scenarios. This phased approach allows the Consortium to gather feedback and ensure the model meets enterprise requirements before wider availability.

For the next testing phase, Soofi is actively recruiting companies, mid-market businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and startups interested in experimenting with industrial AI applications. Organizations wishing to participate are asked to contact contact@soofi.info with a brief company description, their industry or application domain, and a potential use-case idea. Beyond direct testing, the Consortium has established the "Open Source Sovereign Foundation Models" workshop series to convene researchers, industry representatives, startups, and policymakers from across Europe to discuss sovereign and open-source AI, thereby strengthening European collaboration in the field. Consortium members regularly present project developments and perspectives on sovereign foundation models at conferences, trade shows, and panels.

The launch of Soofi S reflects a broader European effort to develop AI capabilities independent of non-European vendors. The Consortium brings together research institutions and startups with the explicit goal of creating transparent, controllable, and verifiable AI systems suitable for regulated industries—sectors where traceability and sovereignty are non-negotiable. By focusing on industrial applications rather than consumer-facing features, Soofi positions itself to address a specific market gap: enterprises that need AI but cannot or will not delegate control to external platforms.

The model's design—a 30 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts architecture trained on 27 trillion tokens—is substantial enough for complex tasks but optimized for German and English language contexts, signaling a deliberate choice to serve European industrial sectors rather than pursue global scale. The emphasis on documents, code generation, and agentic systems aligns with enterprise pain points in manufacturing, logistics, finance, and public administration. The current phase of industrial partner testing serves as both validation and early adoption pathway.