STACKIT Compute Engine

STACKIT Compute Engine is the virtual-machine service of STACKIT, the cloud run by Schwarz Digits, the IT arm of the Schwarz Group behind Lidl and Kaufland. It runs in two regions, Germany (EU01) and Austria (EU02), on Intel, AMD and ARM flavours with fixed CPU-to-RAM ratios, billed by the hour. Windows Server is available with the licence included, and GPU servers carry NVIDIA A100, L40S or H100 cards.

Availability is where it is most specific. A VM can sit in one zone, or in a Metro zone that restarts it elsewhere in the region if its own zone fails, and the published service certificate (version 1.6, July 2026) commits to 99.5%, 99.8% and 99.9% respectively for a single VM, a Metro VM, and a group spread across zones. Ordinary VMs live-migrate during host maintenance; GPU and AMD SEV machines get announced maintenance windows instead. The certificate also notes that several zones can share one building.

The catch is access. Self-service sign-up is for companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with a VAT ID and a commercial-register number; everyone else goes through sales, and there is no route for private individuals.

STACKIT is a German cloud provider operated by Schwarz Digits, the technology arm of the Schwarz Group (Lidl, Kaufland), Europe’s largest retailer. The legal entity is Schwarz Digits Cloud GmbH & Co. KG, headquartered in Heilbronn, Germany.

The product covers compute, storage, networking, managed Kubernetes, and managed databases, with data residency exclusively in Germany. In April 2026 STACKIT was selected — alongside Scaleway, Post Telecom, and Proximus — as a winner of the European Commission’s €180M sovereign cloud procurement, with the SEAL-3 sovereignty rating. The Schwarz Group is fully owned by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.