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Welcome to A.I. Lab
Slovenia has secured European funding for the establishment of a new supercomputer and a Slovenian AI factory. The University of Ljubljana will be strongly involved in the Slovenian AI factory, especially the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, which is one of the key centers for artificial intelligence in Slovenia.
The supercomputer will be tailored for building artificial intelligence models and their deployment, while through the AI factory Slovenian experts will establish an ecosystem that will provide users from companies, research organizations, and the public sector with key services for the development and use of artificial intelligence in one place.
Slovenia submitted an application to the second call of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) for the establishment of a new supercomputer and a Slovenian AI factory. On March 12, 2025, the EuroHPC JU announced that the Slovenian proposal is among the six selected projects. The project will be funded by the EuroHPC JU, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation.
An important element of the project is the establishment of the Slovenian AI factory ( SLAIF ), which will connect experts in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. The comprehensive solutions developed within this framework will be intended for companies, research organizations, and the public sector. SLAIF will, among other things, offer training in artificial intelligence and supercomputing, consulting, support in using developed solutions and building custom models, easy access to data, and user-friendly software tools.
SLAIF will support all areas of science and the economy, with a particular focus on green transition technologies in agriculture, energy, and industry; digital transformation through the development of large language models and other services; medicine for faster disease detection and drug discovery; and science for developing advanced predictive models and new materials.
Researchers at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science (FRI) are the largest users of the Vega supercomputer for artificial intelligence purposes, and will therefore contribute their knowledge and experience to the establishment of the new system, both in software and hardware. With a forty-year tradition in artificial intelligence, they cover many key areas and will play an important role in developing and delivering training and consulting for users with varying levels of expertise, while continuing to research and develop new AI solutions.
The Faculty of Computer and Information Science has already begun taking initial steps to strengthen activities in this area. These primarily include major investments in its own infrastructure, starting with the establishment of a high-density hybrid data center , for which a contract was signed in January this year. Additional investments will follow. The data center and supercomputing equipment will play an important role until the new Slovenian supercomputer is established. In the coming days, specifically on March 25, just one week after one of the largest AI developer conferences, NVIDIA GTC 2025, the Faculty of Computer and Information Science will host representatives of NVIDIA as part of the conference NVIDIA & FRI AI Day .
The new Slovenian supercomputer, which will provide computing resources for the AI factory, is expected to be established in early 2027 and will replace the Vega supercomputer, which is reaching the end of its lifecycle. It will be installed in a new ARNES data center located near the Mariborski otok hydroelectric power plant and will thus be directly powered by renewable energy sources. The supercomputer will be built from a large number of nodes with modern central processing units, and to support artificial intelligence it will also include numerous nodes with tightly interconnected graphical accelerators. It will enable a wide range of computationally intensive scientific simulations and the development of various artificial intelligence models, as well as the deployment of AI solutions for end users.
The project to establish the new supercomputer and AI factory will be led by IZUM, with participation from the University of Ljubljana, Jožef Stefan Institute, University of Maribor, University of Nova Gorica, University of Primorska, Faculty of Information Studies Novo mesto, ARNES, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia, and the Ljubljana Technology Park.
A total of eight research laboratories from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana are involved in the project: