Prospects for U.S.-German Collaboration in AI

Zane Davis

Halle Foundation/AGI Intern

Zane Davis is a summer 2025 Halle Foundation Intern at the American-German Institute. His primary research interests include artificial intelligence policy, labor economics, and global trade.

Prior to joining AGI, Zane completed his bachelor's degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also earned minors in German and philosophy. He developed an interest in artificial intelligence and global trade while working for a Munich-based software startup in 2022. In 2023, he relocated to Germany, where he played American football for the Ingolstadt Dukes of the German Football League. Since then, he has worked for organizations spanning the United States, Korea, and Thailand, strengthening his background in public policy and international affairs.

In the fall of 2025, he will return to Chapel Hill to begin the Master of Public Administration program at the UNC School of Government.

The American-German relationship has entered a new era of uncertainty defined by shifting commitments on defense, a renegotiation of longstanding trade partnerships, and an uneasy alignment against strategic competitors including Russia, China, and Iran. At the same time, the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence technology is offering policymakers a new set of powerful tools to advance their strategic and economic interests. This nascent chapter in the transatlantic relationship represents a historic opportunity for policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic to reshape relations for the mid-twenty-first century.

Blueprints from Abroad

This article identifies three key pillars of opportunity for transatlantic cooperation on AI: cybersecurity, research, and infrastructure development. It examines how the United States and Germany can strengthen their relationship in these areas, using policy examples from Japan, India, and France as a guide. The goal is to provide a practical framework for building a more robust U.S.-German partnership in the AI sector.

Cybersecurity

The United States and Germany share a common strategic interest in combatting cyberattacks from Russia and China. Advancements in AI have drastically shifted the threat landscape in cyberspace over the last five years, making phishing scams, ransomware attacks, and other forms of cyberaggression easier to engineer and cheaper to execute. Given the shared threat faced by Germany and the United States, collaboration on AI cyberdefense research represents a second opportunity for strengthening transatlantic collaboration.

In 2023, German businesses suffered a record €178.6 billion in estimated damages from cyberattacks, with Russia and China cited as the two most aggressive perpetrators. In January 2025, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that named Russia and China as America’s key adversaries in cyberspace and called for greater investment into AI cyberdefense. The Trump administration’s July 2025 AI Action Plan is even more aggressive in promoting the need for AI-enabled cyberdefensive tools to keep American critical infrastructure secure.

Part of these efforts to leverage AI for cybersecurity and defense applications include investments in joint research and development with allies. The U.S. Department of Defense already provides funding to several research institutions that investigate the cybersecurity and defense implications of AI. One of these institutions is the MITRE Corporation’s Center for Threat-Informed Defense, which conducts research on “cyber adversary” behavior.

To capitalize on their shared interest in cyberdefense against China, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) is establishing a research facility in Washington to collaborate with MITRE on AI cyberattack research. For the United States, the NICT holds valuable data on cyberattacks emanating from Beijing. The joint research will benefit Japan through access to American funding and research talent with the end product informing the development of data-backed countermeasures to defend Japan against AI-augmented cyberattacks.

A U.S.-German initiative on cybersecurity research following the NICT’s example provides an opportunity to strengthen transatlantic collaboration on cybersecurity against the common threats of Russia and China. Germany’s federal cybersecurity authority, the Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI), has recognized that AI models “reduce entry barriers and increase scale and speed of malicious operations.” The German federal research ministry (BMFTR) has published a Cybersecurity Research Agenda that explicitly calls for “research collaborations with international partners on global technologies and standards in the field of cybersecurity.” To address the growing cybersecurity risks posed by AI, Germany can offer resources from the BSI and the BMFTR to support collaborative research projects in the United States. Through a joint research initiative in the United States, Germany would gain an additional lever for strengthening its own cyberdefense capacity.

Research

Germany ranks third worldwide in highly-cited AI research publications, trailing only the United States and China. The concentration of German research talent at publicly-funded institutions like the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI) has produced significant advancements in AI subfields from interpretability to industrial automation. Germany is also home to several “innovation clusters”: partnerships between universities, research institutes, and private sector actors like AIR (Artificial Intelligence Regensburg) or Cyber Valley designed to serve as hubs of technology research and implementation.

In a time when traditional alliances are fracturing, the recent U.S. partnerships with Japan, India, and France provide German policymakers and business leaders with practical blueprints for collaboration in a key sector.

Germany’s leadership in AI research makes it a valuable potential collaborator for the United States, which has already demonstrated interest in strengthening AI research partnerships abroad. In April 2024, the United States announced a $110 million investment package financed by private-sector investors including NVIDIA, Amazon, and SoftBank to support joint research initiatives in artificial intelligence between universities in the United States and Japan. The initiative establishes two key academic partnerships: one between the University of Washington and the University of Tsukuba and another between Carnegie Mellon University and Keio University. The collaboration between University of Washington and University of Tsukuba will support $50 million of AI research projects on health, robotics, trustworthy AI, and more. This Trans-Pacific Partnership on AI, or X-PAI, signals what a potential “Transatlantic Partnership on AI” could look like.

A collaboration between U.S. and German universities would present an attractive investment opportunity to American AI players like NVIDIA and Microsoft, who have already invested billions into German projects and stand to gain from deepened transatlantic cooperation on AI. German industry leaders in automotive manufacturing like BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche, along with pharmaceutical giants like Bayer and BioNTech, have also demonstrated interest in supporting the development of AI technologies for industrial applications in Germany. Specific topics of focus for U.S.-German research partnerships would likely include robotics, industrial AI, and AI for biotechnology.

Infrastructure Development

The United States is interested in expanding its influence abroad through the development of U.S.-origin AI infrastructure (e.g. data centers), strengthening American energy partnerships, and cementing the dominance of American-made AI models in private-sector applications. The Trump administration reaffirmed this commitment in July 2025, publishing America’s AI Action Plan alongside three executive orders, including “Promoting The Export Of The American AI Technology Stack.” As the world’s third-largest economy, Germany represents perhaps the most valuable expansion market available to U.S. AI firms today.

From a German perspective, the underdevelopment of AI compute capacity in Germany threatens to hamper the competitiveness of the German Mittelstand in a global economy driven by automated manufacturing and digital services. In response, German industry leaders in automotives, manufacturing, and medicine have all voiced their support for accelerated investment in AI infrastructure. A recent study on Germany’s AI infrastructure ecosystem found that Germany would need to triple its compute capacity and invest roughly €60 billion in additional AI infrastructure by 2030 to meet the growing domestic demand for AI services. To address these issues, the German government is currently drafting a national AI infrastructure strategy. A more robust transatlantic partnership on AI infrastructure could become a valuable resource for the German government as one pillar of this strategy, bringing in billions from U.S. firms like Oracle to support large-scale data infrastructure projects.

While the EU AI Act has raised concerns of overregulation among AI leaders in Europe and the United States,[1] Europe has shown a strong appetite for growth and innovation on AI infrastructure, dedicating a €20 billion fund specifically to AI “gigafactories.” Mistral and NVIDIA’s partnership in France proves that collaborative ventures at the national level on AI infrastructure are possible within the EU’s regulatory framework.

The accelerated development of AI infrastructure would also align with Germany’s “technological sovereignty” agenda—so long as infrastructure projects follow the example set by France and Mistral. The joint venture between Mistral and NVIDIA massively expands France’s domestic compute capacity while serving Mistral’s own European-made, open source models and ensuring domestic control over development and deployment priorities.

To see what a broader collaboration on AI infrastructure could look like, consider the India-U.S. TRUST initiative announced in February 2025. The TRUST initiative deepens India-U.S. ties[2] by accelerating the development of India’s AI infrastructure through collaboration with American AI data and chip manufacturers. The essential goals of a U.S.-German AI agreement would be similar to that of the TRUST initiative, providing American firms with a key expansion market while empowering Germany to address its own compute needs and reinforce its strategic autonomy.

A first step toward achieving this collaboration would be the development of an “AI Roadmap” with input from German and American private industry, akin to the forthcoming US-India Roadmap on Accelerating AI Infrastructure. This roadmap would identify barriers to investment, construction, and operation of U.S.-German AI infrastructure in Germany.

In a time when traditional alliances are fracturing, the recent U.S. partnerships with Japan, India, and France provide German policymakers and business leaders with practical blueprints for collaboration in a key sector. This pragmatic approach offers a durable foundation for transatlantic cooperation by addressing the specific shared challenges that can be solved or created by artificial intelligence. Joint initiatives targeting cybersecurity, research, and infrastructure represent three concrete opportunities to strengthen the American-German partnership for a future shaped by artificial intelligence.

[1] The risk-based framework of the AI Act does not directly regulate physical AI infrastructure such as data centers. It governs the development and deployment of highly-capable AI models—not the chips, racks, and factories that serve those models.

[2] The reignition of trade tensions between the United States and India in August 2025 has put the success of the TRUST initiative in jeopardy. While it remains to be seen if the specific commitments on AI infrastructure included in the agreement will be upheld, the general structure of the initiative still serves as an effective blueprint for other nations seeking bilateral cooperation.