AI in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region

Frankfurt is Germany's largest data center market, according to the operator STACK Infrastructure, and the reason sits in the city: DE-CIX Frankfurt, which calls itself Europe's largest internet exchange, has passed 18 terabits per second of peak traffic, and DE-CIX names AI workloads among the drivers of that growth. Cloud providers run their German regions from data centers in and around Frankfurt, so an AI model that a bank or insurer calls from the cloud often runs a few kilometers from its head office.

For finance this matters twice. Latency and data location decide where banks and exchanges place their systems, and DORA makes every cloud and model contract part of a bank's own risk management. That is also why digital sovereignty is a finance topic in Frankfurt: Helaba and Schwarz Digits have agreed a strategic partnership to build AI applications for the financial sector on open-source technology and European data protection standards. The AI in banking in Frankfurt page describes what the city's banks run on this infrastructure.

AI Frankfurt Rhein-Main e.V. calls itself the AI network of business, science and society in the Rhine-Main region. It is a non-profit association that grew out of an AI Frankfurt initiative of the city, and representatives of more than 60 companies and research institutions came together at its founding at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (in German). The association works on research transfer, knowledge sharing and education, and it wants the region to become a leading place for AI applications.

Next to it, AI Hub Frankfurt Rhein-Main runs AI Week Frankfurt and trainings for companies and lists Commerzbank, Helaba, DekaBank, KfW IPEX-Bank and Metzler among its partners. AI Founders Connect brings AI founders, investors and corporates of Hesse together and counts more than 800 members. Frankfurt Data Science holds practice-oriented meetups, several of them at TechQuartier.

hessian.AI, the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence, is carried by 13 Hessian universities. Its main site is at TU Darmstadt, with a second site at Goethe University Frankfurt. In its development phase the state of Hesse funded it with 38 million euros and 20 new professorships. Its AI innovation lab in Darmstadt gives companies and researchers access to AI computing infrastructure, and hessian.AI is part of the EDITH consortium.

On the finance side, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management runs a part-time Master of Artificial Intelligence & Data Science with company projects at firms such as Deutsche Börse Group and PwC, as the data science in finance page explains. A Frankfurt bank that wants to test a model with researchers finds Darmstadt less than an hour away by train.

The city's largest AI buyers are its banks, insurers and supervisors. The ECB, the Bundesbank, BaFin, EIOPA and the new EU anti-money laundering authority AMLA sit in Frankfurt, and the ECB runs its own suptech tools. The AI in finance in Frankfurt page goes through what the banks and the ECB use AI for, and the EU AI Act in financial services page covers the rules.

Finance Loop is the meeting place where Frankfurt's finance people meet the city's AI engineers, researchers and founders. It connects the finance, IT and AI communities in Frankfurt and holds events in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg too.

AI Hub Frankfurt and AI Founders Connect are event and network partners of Finance Loop. For AI Week Frankfurt, Finance Loop ran an official side event on AI and blockchain in institutional finance with Frankfurt Main Finance, AI Hub Frankfurt and others. Under its cooperation with Frankfurt Data Science, Finance Loop announced the after-work event "AI Governance. From Policies to Practice." at TechQuartier, and with Finteda and Frankfurt Data Science it supports Claude Hacker House there. It also organizes the Frankfurt Quantum Finance Forum.

A non-profit association that calls itself the AI network of business, science and society in the Rhine-Main region. It was founded with more than 60 companies and research institutions and works on research transfer, knowledge sharing and education.

DE-CIX, Europe's largest internet exchange by its own account, is in Frankfurt, and networks and cloud providers build next to it. For banks and exchanges, short distances to their own systems and to the exchange add a latency advantage.

AI Hub Frankfurt runs AI Week Frankfurt, and fAInance near Frankfurt Airport is an AI conference for staff of financial institutions. Finance Loop lists these and smaller meetups on the events page and in the calendar above.

Frankfurt Data Science, AI Founders Connect and Finance Loop all hold meetups in the city, several of them at TechQuartier. Claude Hacker House adds a hands-on evening for people who want to build with AI.