A German AI consortium shipped an open model that beats every open rival on German benchmarks
Soofi S comes from a consortium including Fraunhofer, DFKI, TU Darmstadt, and six other German research bodies, funded through the EU's IPCEI-CIS program. It leads every fully open model on German language tests.
A German consortium just shipped an open 30B model that beats every open rival on German benchmarks.
A German research consortium released Soofi S, a 31.6 billion parameter open model that activates just 3.2 billion parameters per token, and it leads every fully open model on German language benchmarks, first place on all seven tests it was measured against.
Who built it
The project is coordinated by the KI Bundesverband, the German AI Association, with the Fraunhofer Institutes IAIS and IIS, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), TU Darmstadt, the University of Wurzburg, the L3S Research Center, Berlin University of Applied Sciences, and the companies Ellamind and Merantix Momentum. Funding runs through Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy via the EU's IPCEI-CIS program, the bloc's semiconductor and cloud infrastructure funding track.
The numbers
Soofi S uses a hybrid Mamba Transformer architecture for efficient long context handling. It scores 70.1 on the English aggregate and 79.1 on the German aggregate, tops all seven German benchmarks including GLP-DE at 88.8 and ARC-Challenge-DE at 92.3, and hits 73.8 percent on HumanEval and 70.2 on MBPP for code. The model meets the Open Source Initiative's Open Source AI Definition 1.0, though about 1.3 percent of training data is commercially licensed newspaper text that keeps it just short of the EU's strictest open data bar.
Why a build studio cares
This is what the European sovereign AI push actually looks like on the ground: publicly funded research institutions shipping a real, benchmarked, mostly open model rather than a policy paper about wanting one. For anything we build that needs an EU hosted or EU trained model option, whether for procurement reasons or a client's own data residency requirements, Soofi S is now a concrete alternative to weigh against US labs, not a hypothetical one.
Next step: read the full writeup at The Decoder for the complete benchmark table and licensing detail. If EU model residency matters for your build, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.