The Slovenian government plans to invest in the nation's second supercomputer with an AI factory – and counts on European support.
To catch up with the USA and China in AI research and applications, the European Union plans to invest 1.5 billion euros in AI Factories through the EuroHPC JU initiative, bringing together computing power and personnel to speed up AI development. In December, EuroHPC JU selected seven sites for the first European AI factories. Slovenia and Austria joined a consortium led by Italy. Slovenia is investing 5 million euros in one of the supercomputer centers in Bologna, Italy – one of the seven selected sites. In February, however, Slovenia applied to the second EuroHPC call on its own. With good reason. Namely that the local AI ecosystem is well developed and flourishing. Ljubljana’s Institute Josef Stefan started to systematically research the field of artificial intelligence back in 1972, first having significant achievements in heuristic search and later in areas including machine learning, inductive logic programming, semantic web technologies and others. Slovenia now hosts UNESCO’s International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence and Slovenian companies are among the European leaders in adoption of AI solutions (see also Artificial intelligence). The government is firmly committed to its AI Strategy and provides various forms of support to the initiatives both from academia and business. The Ministry of Digital Transformation actively participated at the AI Action Summit in Paris. The government’s agency SPIRIT Slovenia, on the other hand, offers support for aspiring SMEs and regularly organises joint presentations at leading ICT trade fairs such as Gitex in Dubai and MWC in Barcelona.
