Technologische Infrastruktur und KI

Artificial intelligence is becoming critical infrastructure - comparable to energy, security, and mobility. German municipalities already rely on a handful of foreign AI platforms for text generation, search, analysis, and operational coordination without owning or controlling the underlying systems. This chapter argues that cities and municipalities should build a local, federated AI architecture capable of running inference, document retrieval, coordination, and proactive analysis on-site. Five bottlenecks - data, regulation, hardware, workforce, and adoption - are analyzed; for each, a bottom-up path is outlined that starts from municipal need rather than national frontier ambition. The technical architecture relies on open interfaces, swappable models, and a cooperative rollout model that balances autonomy with collaboration. The goal is not total autarky but a position in which municipalities remain governable under stress, keep value creation in the region, and own AI as public infrastructure rather than renting it as a subscription.