26 June 2026
When we announced our AI infrastructure partnership with RTL Deutschland, we laid the foundation for delivering enterprise-grade AI at scale. Today, that infrastructure has reached its next milestone.
Over the past months, the Sidekicks engineering team has completed a comprehensive redesign of our production AI infrastructure at RTL Deutschland, significantly expanding the platform that powers our customers today while preparing it for continued growth.
This wasn’t simply a hardware upgrade. It was a complete redesign of our production environment, improving scalability, resilience, and long-term performance as demand for enterprise AI continues to increase.
The project included several significant infrastructure enhancements:
- A complete redesign of our network architecture, creating a faster and more resilient foundation.
- A threefold increase in available electrical power capacity, providing the headroom required for substantially larger AI workloads.
- A doubling of production server capacity.
- Improved redundancy and operational resilience across the platform.
Together, these enhancements provide the capacity and resilience needed to support more concurrent AI workloads, onboard additional customers, and accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI models as the Sidekicks product portfolio continues to expand.
As AI adoption accelerates across the media industry, infrastructure requirements are evolving just as quickly. Media organisations are processing more content, deploying AI across more workflows, and expecting enterprise-grade reliability from every interaction.
Rather than expanding our infrastructure incrementally, we chose to redesign it from the ground up. This investment provides the foundation for the next phase of Sidekicks’ growth, supporting larger deployments, increasing customer demand, and enabling future AI capabilities. It ensures our infrastructure grows ahead of our customers’ needs, not behind them.
A transformation of this scale doesn’t happen in isolation. We’re grateful for the close collaboration and support from RTL Deutschland and the RTL Technology team throughout the project. Their expertise, guidance, and hands-on support, from infrastructure planning and implementation to providing critical utilities and technical resources, were instrumental in delivering this new environment.
This collaboration reflects the strength of the broader RTL ecosystem and demonstrates what’s possible when engineering teams work together to build scalable AI infrastructure.
Infrastructure is rarely the most visible part of an AI platform, but it is one of the most important. While customers may never see the servers, network architecture, or power systems behind Sidekicks, they experience the benefits every day through reliability, performance, and the confidence that the platform is built to scale alongside their business.
With this new infrastructure in place, Sidekicks is well positioned to support more customers, more AI workloads, and the next wave of innovation in enterprise media AI.
Shira Leffel is the VP of Marketing at smartclip, the adtech business of RTL Group. She leads the marketing and product education department, helping Europe’s largest broadcasters adopt innovative advertising technology solutions. With over 10 years of marketing leadership experience across tech—ranging from startups to public companies—Shira specialises in transforming complex technology into compelling, marketable stories. Her career has taken her across the globe, with roles in the United States, Canada, Israel, Mozambique, Brazil, and now Germany, shaping her inclusive and impactful approach to marketing. Shira graduated Summa Cum Laude and First in Class with an M.A. from Tel Aviv University and First Class Honours with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia.
Shira Leffel
VP Marketing & Product Education
