Niederer Kraft Frey acted as legal advisor to Phoenix Technologies AG in the negotiations and the conclusion of an AI collaboration agreement with IBM.

Phoenix Technologies is the Swiss Tech Cluster for AI and cloud-based technologies, data-protected computing and digital assets and identities. Phoenix’s kvant AI addresses the growing demand for solutions for building, tuning and deploying advanced AI models in a sovereign cloud in Switzerland, characterized by very high availability, scalability and security at every level of the technology stack.

IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is a multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, N.Y. IBM is one of the world’s largest IT companies.

The collaboration between Phoenix and IBM provides kvant AI users with a complete end-to-end AI solution based on state-of-the-art AI computing capabilities to support the development of Foundation Models. Customers can take advantage of the complete kvant AI solution from Phoenix that applies IBM watsonx, including kvant AI offerings such as AI Unit, AI Services and AI Data Services. To accelerate innovation, kvant AI meets common compliance and certification standards as well as the high regulatory requirements for authorities, companies and scale-ups from all major industries in Switzerland. The complete AI stack is part of an AI Innovation Center that will open in summer 2024 in the heart of one of the most dynamic life science clusters in Europe, the Switzerland Innovation Park Basel Area Main Campus in Allschwil, providing access to 115,000 m2 of innovation space. The AI Innovation Center will be an inspiring place with extensive computing capacity and AI software, offering a platform of commercially available end-to-end solutions and reliable infrastructure. This will be open to all industries to promote the use and further development of AI and build local AI ecosystems.

The NKF team was led by Technology partner Janine Reudt-Demont, working with associate Jonathan Felber (Technology/M&A/Corporate).