Romania\u2019s first artificial intelligence factory, a European project hosted by the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI Bucharest), could become operational in the first part of 2027, according to the institute\u2019s general director, Adrian-Victor Vevera.<\/p>\n
The project could be up and running \u201csomewhere in March, April, May,\u201d according to the official, cited by Agerpres<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cICI has been involved for at least 4 years in European Hypercomputing projects. We are the national competence center for Hypercomputing. We then joined the project managed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, an artificial intelligence factory built on the structure of the Barcelona supercomputer. We are part of these projects, but the moment has come, in the third wave of development of the European artificial intelligence network: Romania has put a flag on the map,\u201d said Adrian-Victor Vevera, at the official opening of the event Bucharest Leaders Summit: United for a Better World.<\/p>\n According to him, ICI Bucharest has started building the RO AI Factory ecosystem and has launched invitations to the private, public, research, and academic sectors for partnership. The service component of the RO AI Factory will be developed by a consortium formed by ICI Bucharest, Politehnica Bucharest, the National Council of Small and Medium Enterprises, the Artificial Intelligence Institute in Cluj, and the Institute of Bioresources.<\/p>\n \u201cWe must take into account that artificial intelligence is a tool, it is a technology, we must use it to increase our capacity and efficiency, not to let it replace the decision-making part,\u201d added the general director of ICI Bucharest.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the other hand, the head of the institution considers that the new technology is \u201ca part in any conflict\u201d due to cybersecurity. \u201cWe must take into account the area of datasets because datasets are becoming a weapon in any future conflict. Data will be a gold mine in the future. They already are,\u201d added the general director of ICI Bucharest.\u00a0<\/p>\n Romania is making significant progress in developing infrastructure dedicated to artificial intelligence starting this year. The country will have at least two AI factories that will become operational in the near future. Several existing HPC centers have been expanded by integrating capacities dedicated to AI, based on architectures optimized for this type of computing.<\/p>\n The two AI factories are located in the central and southern parts of the country and involve extensive collaborations between the public and private sectors, with total investments of over EUR 70 million. The RO AI Factory supercomputer will be a EuroHPC-class system, optimized for artificial intelligence tasks, advanced modeling, and training of foundation and large language models.<\/p>\n The AI Factory will have unprecedented computing power in Romania, the full system being able to reach a theoretical performance of over 5 exaFLOPS in AI operations. This capacity places the infrastructure among the most advanced artificial intelligence systems in Central and Eastern Europe, being capable of supporting the training and deployment of state-of-the-art AI models, including large-scale generative and multimodal models.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are locations in the center and west of the country, but also near Bucharest or in Dobrogea, which meet most of the essential criteria related to location, power supply, connectivity, and resilience. We are thus optimistic that new data center developments will soon be announced, of powers and sizes unprecedented for Romania,\u201d said Mihai Manole, Managing Partner of Tema Energy.<\/p>\n