OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in a Handelsblatt interview on August 14, 2026, a second German office in Berlin, in addition to the existing location in Munich. Germany ranks among the three largest and fastest-growing markets worldwide for paying ChatGPT customers. Altman gave no fixed opening date.
Berlin complements the Munich office
So far, OpenAI is present in Germany only through an office in Munich. In the interview with Handelsblatt, Altman announced a second location in the capital – the opening should follow “pretty soon,” though he gave no specific date. The market size supports the expansion: according to Altman, Germany, alongside the US, is one of the three largest countries worldwide for paying ChatGPT subscriptions and is also Europe’s largest single market. He described the country as one of the company’s fastest-growing markets overall. As evidence of its economic footing, Altman cited the collaboration with Deutsche Telekom, without giving further project details. Just days earlier, OpenAI had already announced an elite partnership with IBM for its global consulting business – a sign of how strongly the company is currently courting business customers. Berlin is also considered the country’s largest tech and startup hub, already hosting branches of Google and Amazon along with numerous AI startups, while Munich is seen more as a corporate and industrial location.
Data center talks remain without results
Altman also pushed in the interview for building a dedicated data center in Germany to meet growing demand for AI infrastructure. He said he has already held talks with representatives of the Berlin state government, though these have not yet produced concrete results. Every country must decide for itself, Altman said, whether to build data centers on its own soil or rent capacity abroad – he hopes Germany will opt for its own infrastructure. He gave no concrete investment figures or a site. The push comes as the federal government has already raised its funding for a German AI gigafactory to one billion euros, aiming to strengthen German bids in the EU’s tender for up to seven AI gigafactories. The European Commission is expected to decide on the sites for those EU-funded gigafactories only in early 2027 – a separate process, regardless of whether OpenAI builds its own capacity. Whether Altman’s push is connected to that process, he left open. Without its own data centers, OpenAI would remain reliant on rented cloud capacity in Germany, for instance through existing partners in Europe.
Data protection pledge aims to ease concerns
A recurring concern among German corporate clients is that their own data could feed into the training of future OpenAI models. Altman explicitly pushed back on this in the interview, pointing to a binding zero-data-retention policy for business customers: under the appropriate agreement, transmitted data would not be stored for later analysis. “I firmly believe in data protection for business customers,” Altman said. The pledge is not new: since the introduction of ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI has committed to not using business customers’ inputs or outputs for training – Altman merely reaffirmed that existing policy in the interview. The commitment still can’t be checked independently: it is independently unverified. Competition is meanwhile also coming from within Europe: just on August 13, French provider Mistral was pitching German corporate clients on guaranteed EU data processing – a move that makes Altman’s assurance look like a direct response. For many German mid-sized companies, actual control over the server location may ultimately matter more than the contractual pledge.
What matters now is whether real capital follows the announcement. An office can open quickly, but a data center takes years of construction, permits, and hundreds of millions in investment – for which there is so far neither a commitment nor a timeline. If OpenAI instead relies on capacity abroad, the data center push would remain mostly a political gesture toward Berlin.
