Santa Clara: PonteSud – News Desk
Sovereign AI has sparked a new Italian renaissance around industrial transformation.
Supporting its design and manufacturing heritage, Italy is among leading European nations in its advanced development of sovereign AI.
Italy joins European nations in building domestic AI infrastructure with an ecosystem of NVIDIA Cloud Partners and telecom providers such as Fastweb.
Italian telecommunications company Fastweb has deployed Italy’s first NVIDIA DGX H100 supercomputer to support national AI infrastructure. With these resources, Fastweb is introducing an Italian language model to support generative AI applications – trained and running on its NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer.
Model builder Domyn – which developed Domyn Small and Domyn Large – is collaborating with NVIDIA on a large AI factory powered by 5,760 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs.
Also, the Italian Ministry of Enterprise and the Made in Italy government initiative are working with Domyn to further boost the nation’s sovereign AI capabilities with advanced reasoning models.
The Italian Ministry of Universities and Research is supporting and co-financing the IT4LIA AI factory initiative as well.
The combination of efforts to deploy AI factory resources for delivering transformative sovereign AI will allow European enterprises, startups and government organizations to securely develop, train and deploy agentic and physical AI applications.
CINECA provides the National HPC service and is a EuroHPC pre-Exascale hosting site with over 15,000 GPUs in the Leonardo supercomputer. They have played a key role in scaling AI codes from Mistral and Domyn.
CINECA recently added the LISA supercomputer, which adds 1328 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs for AI for science applications.
CINECA has also been selected by EuroHPC to build a new AI factory, which will be operational in 2025. The new IT4LIA AI factory will provide new AI capabilities to both research computing and Italian startups.
“This agreement represents a fundamental step towards strengthening Italy’s technological sovereignty, ensuring our companies secure and competitive access to data management,” said Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy Adolfo Urso.
“The collaboration with excellent partners such as NVIDIA and Domyn demonstrates the Government’s concrete commitment to promoting strategic alliances aimed at supporting innovation and enhancing the competitiveness of the national production system.”
Vertiv, a global critical digital infrastructure and services provider that operates in Italy, is helping deliver AI-ready, pre-fabricated modular data center infrastructure for the Domyn Colosseum development, including power, cooling, management, monitoring, service and maintenance offerings. This data center aims to stand out with its modular setup and fast time to launch.
“Colosseum development stakeholders – Domyn, World Wide Technologies, Vertiv and NVIDIA – leveraged NVIDIA Omniverse for collaboration and real-time simulations, reducing simulation times from months to hours.
Vertiv manufacturing and factory integration processes reduce deployment time by up to 50%, compared with traditional data center builds,” said Karsten Winther, president of Vertiv, EMEA. “Together, we are setting new standards for flexibility and speed of deployment for critical AI factories.”
The AI data center from Domyn includes plans to use NVIDIA Llama Nemotron models and NVIDIA Nemotron techniques for building AI agent platforms with advanced open reasoning foundation models.
Domyn’s supercomputer is designed to support the development of large-scale artificial intelligence solutions in the most highly regulated industries.
“AI is transforming Italy and industries worldwide, enabling organizations to innovate responsibly while upholding the highest standards of trust and compliance,” said Uljan Sharka, CEO of Domyn.
“Working with NVIDIA, we are building AI infrastructure and models tailored to our unique values and regulatory needs to drive sustainable growth and position Italy as a leader in this transformative technology.”
Leonardo is accelerating its advanced physics for aerospace engineering with the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, boosting its helicopter design and simulation.
The company also operates the Davinci-1 supercomputer. Davinci-1 assists in its advanced internal research and development, and is available for AI applications delivered by Leonardo Hypercomputing Continuum to customers.
Italian startup K2K is developing visual language models for real-time video analytics in cities, manufacturing and public infrastructure. K2K aims to deliver operational efficiencies in services through AI agents and physical AI, with vision language models for a range of applications such as waste management, visual pollution and traffic management.
Top universities – from Bologna and Torino to Milano and Roma – offer talent for Italy to lead the way with its sovereign AI strategy. NVIDIA has been collaborating through the NVIDIA AI Technology Center program with CINI Laboratorio AIIS (Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems), a consortium of 50 Italian universities and research institutes, which has trained 3,000+ academics and co-published 50+ scientific papers to date.
Now, more than 200 AI projects are actively running on Leonardo versus about 20 in 2020.
In addition to collaborating with the Domyn development on Colosseum, the Ministry of Enterprise and the government’s Made in Italy initiative are seeking to prepare the workforces of the future.
The parties aim to build an AI-skilled workforce capable of driving innovation that draws on NVIDIA technologies, Domyn’s expertise in AI models for highly regulated industries and the Ministry’s commitment to economic resilience and innovation. NVIDIA globally offers learning courses through its Deep Learning Institute to promote education and certification in AI.
