Berlin, October 20, 2024 – The digital association Bitkom is calling for Germany’s competitiveness to be significantly increased before the digital summit in Frankfurt/Main that begins on Monday. “The goal for Germany and Europe must be to compete for digital technologies and innovations on an equal footing with global pioneers such as the USA or China – as a strong, self-confident and digitally sovereign player,” says Bitkom President Dr. Ralf Wintergerst. The federal government’s digital summit takes place under the motto “Germany Digital: Innovative. Sovereign. International.” Wintergerst: “The summit motto describes a digital Germany that is at the top internationally, innovative and confident. Politics, business and civil society should pursue the common goal of moving Germany forward digitally. This requires a high level of ambition, team play and willingness to perform.”
Frankfurt is an outstanding infrastructure location and therefore the ideal venue for the digital summit. Hesse is Germany’s most important location for data centers with DE-CIX as Europe’s largest network node at the center. Almost a third of Germany’s data center capacity is located there; compared to the other top locations in Europe, Frankfurt is currently growing the fastest. “Efficient data centers, like the entire digital infrastructure, are extremely important for our digital sovereignty and the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence,” emphasizes Bitkom President Wintergerst. The network expansion has become a nationwide success story in recent years: “The network operators have set a high pace for expansion. 5G is available for at least 98 percent of households. From 2018 to 2022, Germany moved up from 16th to 4th place in digital infrastructure in the EU comparison. This shows that if politics and business pull together, we can achieve a lot in Germany in a short space of time.”
Overall, Germany and Europe are not as badly positioned as is often rumored. But the multiple crises showed our economic vulnerability, said Bitkom President Dr. Ralf Wintergerst. “We can no longer approach our challenges with more and more regulation, but rather with more and more innovation. We need the interaction of innovation-friendly regulation and investment incentives.”
The Digital Summit has taken place annually since 2006, when it was still known as the National IT Summit. The successful projects to date include the Smart School Initiative, from which the Digital Pact for Schools emerged. The nationwide network of focus centers for the digitization of Germany’s leading industries, so-called German Digital Hubs, was also envisioned and approved at the summit. In addition, the initiatives for the uniform government telephone number 115, the institution of a federal CIO, the broadband strategy, the anti-bot network and the Germany Safe on the Internet initiative were created here. The Gaia-X project for a European cloud and data infrastructure was also developed as part of the digital summit. The concept for a data institute was presented in 2022.
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