Summary

A structure you can check

Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH was founded in 1988 as a non-profit public-private partnership, with its registered seat in Kaiserslautern. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/about-us/dfki-at-a-glance/company-profile Its company profile describes research facilities in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen, Lower Saxony (Oldenburg and Osnabrück) and Darmstadt, laboratories in Berlin and Lübeck, and a branch office in Trier. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/about-us/dfki-at-a-glance/company-profile The locations page lists street addresses for each, including the Berlin site in the Kesselhaus in der Lanolinfabrik at Salzufer 15/16. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/about-us/locations-contact

The shareholder and supervisory-board pages give the governance its substance: federal and state ministries, universities and industrial companies — including BMW, Robert Bosch, Google, SAP, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Intel, Deutsche Telekom, Volkswagen and Airbus — sit on the supervisory board, with Prof. Dr. Oscar-Werner Reif of Sartorius Ventures GmbH as chair and Dr. Lutz Rumkorf of the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Science and Health as vice chair. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/about-us/dfki-at-a-glance/shareholders https://www.dfki.de/en/web/about-us/dfki-at-a-glance/supervisory-board

Dated leadership records

The management record is checkable. On 2019-11-07 the supervisory board appointed Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger as CEO and chairman of the management board, succeeding Prof. Dr. Jana Koehler, who moved to a research area at DFKI Saarbrücken. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/news/change-in-dfki-management The management page names Helmut Ditzer as a second managing director and lists site executive directors including Prof. Dr. Andreas Dengel (Kaiserslautern), Prof. Dr. Frank Kirchner (Bremen), Prof. Dr. Daniel Sonntag (Niedersachsen) and Prof. Dr. Philipp Slusallek (Saarbrücken); the same page also shows dated mixing of current and past entries, and Wolfgang Wahlster is listed as Chief Executive Advisor. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/about-us/dfki-at-a-glance/managing-director-management-board

In 2022 the supervisory board elected Dr. Ferri Abolhassan of Deutsche Telekom AG as chairman and reported that DFKI's financial volume had grown from €56.6 million in 2019 to an estimated €82.8 million in 2022. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/news/dfki-supervisory-board-elects-new-chairman-and-new-vice-chairwoman

The latest dated event is the clearest: at its meeting on 2025-11-20, held at the Kesselhaus in der Lanolinfabrik — DFKI's new Berlin premises — the supervisory board elected Prof. Dr. Oscar-Werner Reif (Sartorius AG) as chairman, with Dr. Lutz Rumkorf as deputy. https://saarland-informatics-campus.de/en/piece-of-news/dfki-supervisory-board-elects-new-chair-and-deputy-chair/ The outgoing chair Dr. Ferri Abolhassan stepped down after a three-year term and remains a board member; the mandates of Abolhassan and the previous deputy, State Secretary Elena Yorgova-Ramanauskas, had ended on 2025-11-03. https://www.openpr.de/news/1296948/DFKI-Aufsichtsrat-waehlt-neuen-Vorsitzenden-und-Stellvertreter-idw.html Reif has represented the shareholder Sartorius on the board since 2020-09-25. https://www.openpr.de/news/1296948/DFKI-Aufsichtsrat-waehlt-neuen-Vorsitzenden-und-Stellvertreter-idw.html

What the record does not carry

The scale story is thinner than the governance story. DFKI's own profile claims 29 research departments, ten competence centers, eight living labs, roughly 960 researchers and administrators and 600 graduate students from more than 76 countries across more than 560 projects — figures the institute publishes without an audit trail, and a figure DFKI's own 2024 Hannover Messe profile put at 28 departments. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/about-us/dfki-at-a-glance/company-profile https://www.hannovermesse.de/apollo/hannover_messe_2024/obs/Binary/A1354051/20240219_DFKI_Unternehmensprofil.pdf In 2025, CEO Krüger additionally took on a one-year role leading the scientific committee of the German AI competence centers, a federal AI Action Plan initiative — a dated role, but an advisory one. https://www.dfki.de/en/web/news/dfki-ceo-antonio-krueger-assumes-leadership-of-the-scientific-committee-for-the-ai-competence-centers

For readers assessing institutional reliability, the split is the point: DFKI's governance can be reconstructed from named, dated records, while its operational scale rests on the institute's own accounting of itself.

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