German AI consortium releases Soofi S, an open 30B model that tops benchmarks in both English and German

Soofi S is one of the first large language models trained entirely on Deutsche Telekom's Industrial AI Cloud in Munich. The open 30B model uses a lean hybrid architecture and a training mix deliberately weighted toward German.

A German research consortium coordinated by the KI Bundesverband (German AI Association) has released Soofi S 30B-A3B, an open language model that, according to its pretraining report, achieves the highest scores on English and German benchmarks among fully open models, surpassing previous leaders like OLMo 3 32B and Apertus 70B.

Thanks to its hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture, Soofi S maintains throughput even at very long contexts, while dense models like Apertus 70B and Qwen3 32B drop off sharply. | Image: Soofi

A lean architecture built for long contexts

Soofi S is a mixture-of-experts model. It contains 31.6 billion parameters in total but activates only about 3.2 billion per generated token. That puts its compute cost closer to a 3B model than a conventional 30B model. The consortium adopts the architecture of Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Nano without modification, a hybrid design combining Mamba-2 layers with standard attention layers.