Speaking at the “AI in Bulgaria: From Regulation to Real-World Applications and Impact” forum held in Sofia on Tuesday, GERB-UDF MP Tomislav Donchev said that there are three agreed deals for the construction of data centres in Bulgaria, one of which is a memorandum with the German company Schwarz Digits.
The forum was organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Bulgaria and the Bulgarian Entrepreneurial Association (BESCO), in partnership with the Economic Policy Institute and the German-Bulgarian Chamber of Industry and Commerce. The discussion at the event is based on the latest study, “AI Adoption Landscape in the Public and Private Sectors in Bulgaria”, made by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Bulgaria.
Donchev, who served as Minister of Innovation and Growth between 2025 and 2026, did not disclose the names of the other two companies, but said they involve another major German company and a very large American company.
“The negotiations with Schwarz were the most advanced. All agreements covered not only the establishment of such a centre, but also the joint use of services,” Donchev said.
He expressed hope that work would continue so that Bulgaria could “achieve sovereignty on two fronts – hardware infrastructure and our own domestic language models”.
According to Donchev, two of the three projects are realistically achievable, as “not all of them are competing with one another”.
He also suggested there could be a connection between the Belene Nuclear Power Plant project and future data centres, due to the enormous amount of electricity such facilities consume.
Donchev described Bulgaria as “a regional powerhouse” in artificial intelligence, not only because of INSAIT’s work and the development of a Bulgarian sovereign language model, but also because of the installation of a new supercomputer at Sofia Tech Park under a joint EUR 90 million project with EuroHPC.
Opening the forum, Norbert Beckmann-Dierkes, Head of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Office in Bulgaria, said that the country is often described as one of the poorest in Europe, but argued that the development of cities such as Sofia and Plovdiv paints a very different picture.
“And we are not talking about low-paid jobs here, we are talking about engineers,” Beckmann-Dierkes said.