Phoenix Technologies Makes Apertus LLM Accessible

(CONNECT) Phoenix Technologies, a local specialist for sovereign cloud and AI infrastructures, wants to make the open language model Apertus LLM accessible in its infrastructure, according to a press release. Apertus is a freely accessible, transparent and comprehensively documented system. It was launched at the beginning of September by the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich (ETH) and Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Supercomputing Center (CSCS). Among other things, it is available in a model with up to 70 billion parameters. The model runs on Phoenix's cloud platform, powered by NVIDIA H100 and H200 next-generation enterprise GPUs.

With Phoenix's offering, Swiss companies and organizations in sensitive areas such as finance, healthcare and administration can for the first time use a state-of-the-art language model without their data having to leave Switzerland.

"This is a declaration of Switzerland's digital independence," Thomas Taroni, Executive Chairman and founder of Phoenix Technologies, is quoted as saying in the press release. "For too long, Swiss companies were faced with a difficult decision: either innovate with foreign AI and risk data sovereignty or fall behind. Today, this decision is outdated. By combining the Apertus model with our sovereign, high-performance infrastructure, we offer the definitive Swiss answer to AI."

Phoenix Technologies is headquartered in Zug, but also operates in the Technopark Zurich. ce/ww