Bulgaria will host one of the six new artificial intelligence factories that the European Union plans to create. On Wednesday, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) selected Bulgaria, along with Austria, France, Germany, Poland and Slovenia, as the new locations for this strategic infrastructure. The total investment in these – with national and European contributions – will be 485 million euros.
The Bulgarian factory will have a total budget of 90 million euros, and the national government is committed to providing 50% of the amount as national co-financing.
The Bulgarian factory will be called BRAIN++ and will be located in Sofia Tech Park. Its construction will begin next year, and the project implementation period is 3 years.
The project includes the construction of a new advanced artificial intelligence supercomputer Discoverer++ and a center that will offer services to government, educational and private organizations and companies.
The team of the current Bulgarian supercomputer Discoverer+ will contribute its expertise in managing the high-performance computing systems of the new machine.
Discoverer++ will feature systems for generative AI workloads, specialized partitions for robotics, satellite space observation and FMCG applications, advanced and optimized storage modules with over 7.5 PB of capacity, and high-speed interconnects enabling processing and training of large AI models.
BRAIN++ envisages the creation of a workspace offering a cloud-based environment for small and medium-sized enterprises, access to high-quality data sets, as well as organizing training programs to develop a qualified community of experts in the field of artificial intelligence in Bulgaria.
The government has supported the winning Bulgarian project with a commitment to provide 50% national funding from 2026.
The INSAIT team will contribute to building generative models for Earth observation, robotics, large language models, etc., which will position Bulgaria as a leader in Europe in the field of artificial intelligence.
The six new EuroHPC projects approved will be part of Europe’s network of artificial intelligence centers, which already includes seven factories selected at the end of last year.
Translated by Tzvetozar Vincent Iolov
Източник: Economic.bg
