When Bernd Wagner tours the company’s new headquarters, he gets excited and says things like: “Seven times more steel than was used to build the Eiffel Tower” or “Cables from here to Naples.”

Wagner is responsible for the cloud business and sales at Schwarz Digits. Huge amounts of steel and cables have been used in the company’s new headquarters, which officially opens on July 21, 2026.

The facilities have capacity for 3,500 employees and have a nursery, restaurant and lounge area. fitness. They are reminiscent of the headquarters of Amazon, Apple or Google. Located on a hill, they consist of five multi-story glass buildings, with wavy and honeycomb shapes. In the center of the so-called Schwarz Digits Campus there is a small pond, lots of greenery and shady benches. “This is a clear message. We have nothing to envy Google or anyone else,” says Wagner.

From supermarkets to digitalization

But the company’s new headquarters is not in California, but in Bad Friedrichshall, a small town in southern Germany. From here it is not much distance to Heilbronn, the hometown of what is surely the richest German in the country, Dieter Schwarz, who is now 86 years old. From Heilbronn Lidl has built its empire. More than 600,000 people work around the world for the companies that are part of the Schwarz Group.

The group has grown mainly thanks to the Lidl and Kaufland supermarkets. But since the Schwarz Group likes to do everything itself, it is growing in all possible directions: food production, waste management, recycling and now, digitalization.

Last year, the Schwarz Group had a turnover of almost 185 billion euros, more than SAP, Mercedes or Bayer. Only the car manufacturer VW was the only German company that brought in more money in Germany in 2025.

Until now, the Schwarz Group has maintained a very reserved attitude, especially regarding its founder, Dieter Schwarz. Today, there are hardly any photos of him. It is said that he can move freely around Heilbronn without being recognized.

The Schwarz Group opts for Germany as its headquarters

Now, the Schwarz Group is back in the news with a project that starts from Schwarz Digits and revolves around digital independence and Germany as its headquarters. “If you don’t sit at the table, you end up being part of the menu,” says Bernd Wagner from his air-conditioned office.

While in recent years Schwarz Digits has mainly dealt with the IT of the 14,500 supermarkets that the group has around the world, now the company also offers cloud and security solutions to companies and public organizations.

Thus, the company wants to ensure that Germany and Europe come back to the table and are not completely dependent on technology from the US or China, says Wagner: “We want to give Europe back its operational capacity.”

This strategy is in fashion. In fact, the company is winning one big contract after another: its clients and partners include the Dutch government, German ministries and the German Football Federation (DFB).

In the Spreewald, an hour’s drive south of Berlin, Schwarz Digits is building a data center. At eleven billion euros, it is the largest single investment in the history of the group.

It is not known how much the company’s new headquarters in Bad Friedrichshall cost. Only one thing is clear: the goal of the new headquarters is to retain IT talent and perhaps even attract new ones. The message is: why move to the expensive Silicon Valley if you can also work here in the south of Germany in the future?

“We are here to stay”

From Heilbronn Town Hall it is a 15-minute drive to the Schwarz Digits headquarters. A robot chef prepares six dishes in it, even at night, for the IT talents of the future.

“The region will very soon become the largest AI pool in Germany and Europe,” says sales manager Bernd Wagner, who believes that they will find their place in Schwarz Digits.

But can the company really stand up to the technology giants? Amazon, for example, had a turnover of $135 billion last year in the cloud business alone. Schwarz Digits, with all its activities, achieves a turnover of 2.2 billion euros.

“We are here to stay,” Bernd Wagner emphasizes confidently. Wagner says opportunities will arise from the market itself, saying that Germany and Europe urgently need independent IT solutions.

Wagner’s call for digital independence sounds a bit like a public relations strategy. But the founder of Lidl, Dieter Schwarz, has already shown on more than one occasion that he has a lot of perseverance and a good sense of smell. Not in vain, the Schwarz Group is today the largest retailer in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. So it is very possible that the richest German’s big technological bet will end up paying off.

(gg/ms)