Building Sovereign AI: The Significance of the Deutschland-Stack and Haystack’s Role

Germany is taking a decisive step toward Sovereign AI - open, adaptable, and secure systems designed to protect national digital independence.

‍

That vision came to life with the introduction of the first version of the Deutschland-Stack (D-Stack), which is a national reference architecture for digital and AI systems, designed to enable collaboration and innovation across federal, state, and municipal levels.

‍

At its core, the D-Stack represents a shared foundation for innovation, as a blueprint for a secure, interoperable, and European-compatible technology platform that strengthens cooperation between Bund, Länder, and Kommunen.

‍

Part of that foundation is Haystack, deepset’s enterprise-adopted open-source framework for building LLM-powered agents and applications (e.g., RAG, Search, Intelligent Document Processing, Text2SQL, multimodal) that can be deployed securely within sovereign infrastructures.

‍

What is the Deutschland-Stack?

The Deutschland-Stack (D-Stack, Germany stack) is a national sovereign technology platform for local public sector digital projects developed under the Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and State Modernization (BMDS). It is a curated set of interoperable, open-source building blocks designed to strengthen Germany’s digital sovereignty.

‍

The D-Stack is both prescriptive and adaptive. Rather than just being a static government standard, it is best understood as a consultative, evolving platform shaped through public participation, inviting input from startups, scale-ups, and technical stakeholders as part of an ongoing national dialogue.

‍

It brings together foundational technologies for cloud, AI, and security, empowering governments and partners to build and operate digital systems with transparency and control.

‍

Backed by BMDS, the D-Stack ensures that critical infrastructure remains open, modular, and self-hostable. By design, the D-Stack bridges federal, state, and municipal levels, providing shared base components for cloud, identity, data, and AI services that can be reused across all levels of government.

‍

“The platform will provide basic components such as cloud and IT services that can be used by the federal government, states, and municipalities,” said State Secretary Dr. Markus Richter. “We invite all interested parties to contribute to the development of the technical standards.”

‍

This open consultation process underscores the government’s commitment to building the D-Stack as a collaborative foundation, one that integrates contributions from the public sector, academia, and the wider technology ecosystem.

Haystack: Powering the core of Sovereign AI Applications

Within this ecosystem, Haystack is included as the reference framework for building AI applications in federal and defense environments, where trust, explainability, and data security are essential.

‍

For example, at SCCON25, secunet Security Networks AG, Germany’s leading provider of public-sector security solutions, announced a reference architecture developed with NVIDIA for processing classified information, powered by Haystack.

‍

Why Haystack?  Haystack enables teams to go from rapid prototypes to mission-ready AI applications like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, AI agents, and domain-specific assistants, all within a sovereign deployment environment.

‍

Its modular design supports:

• Air-gapped deployments for defense systems
• Federated architectures across government ministries
• Cloud-native scaling in administrative use cases

‍

This flexibility, combined with open-source transparency, defines what Sovereign AI looks like in practice and what the Deutschland-Stack enables at scale.

‍

As the D-Stack matures, open-source frameworks like Haystack that emphasize interoperability and compliance are well positioned to become core, Stack-certified components across government levels.

From Proofs of Concept to Production Systems

Across Europe, both public and private organizations are using Haystack to move from experimentation to production.

• The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR) is modernizing document understanding and knowledge access through Haystack-based RAG systems that keep sensitive data inside national infrastructure and comply with Deutschland-Stack requirements.
• Airbus, in partnership with the German Armed Forces, applies Haystack to secure, real-time defense decision workflows that demand the highest levels of accuracy and adaptability.
• State Government of Baden-Württemberg together with PD - Berater der öffentlichen Hand used Haystack for building a sovereign, model-agnostic AI assistant that can be operated on self-managed infrastructure and supports working with text-based content (referred to as F13, fully open sourced) (Source: F13 / Microservices / RAG · GitLab)
  
  

These deployments illustrate how open-source innovation directly supports the D-Stack’s vision: connecting national priorities with proven, production-ready AI technology.

The Pillars of Sovereign AI

As deepset CEO Milos Rusic wrote on LinkedIn:

“Customizability, deployment flexibility, and Open Source are the cornerstones of Sovereign AI, not only in Germany but across the globe.”

‍

Those three principles guide both Haystack as a product and deepset as a company:

• Customizability: Tailor AI pipelines and models to your organization’s specific knowledge, rules, and governance.
  
• Open Source: Maintain transparency, auditability, and freedom from vendor lock-in.
• Deployment flexibility: Run anywhere, from secure on-prem systems to hybrid or air-gapped setups.

‍

Together, they enable organizations to build AI they can trust, control, and own, for the use cases that matter most.

Looking Ahead: A Model for Europe and Beyond

The Deutschland-Stack is more than a national initiative, it’s a template for collaborative, standards-based digital sovereignty.

‍

By grounding federal infrastructure in open, modular components, it enables faster innovation while ensuring that AI development remains aligned with public values and accountability.

‍

For deepset and Haystack, this also provides a clear framework for aligning future development with evolving D-Stack standards, ensuring interoperability and readiness for formal ecosystem inclusion. The Deutschland-Stack's emphasis on openness and modularity creates natural synergies with Haystack's architecture, making it an ideal fit for sovereign AI systems.

‍

As Europe takes the lead in defining responsible and sovereign AI ecosystems, we’re proud that Haystack, born from open-source collaboration, is now part of the foundation enabling that future.  This collaboration fully aligns with our mission to empower organizations to build AI with purpose and to fully own their intelligence for the use cases that matter most.

‍

{{cta-dark}}

{{cta-light}}

‍

‍