We are pleased to announce, as chairing company of the Industry Facilitation Group of the IPCEI-CIS, the launch of Fact8ra, the first multi-provider AI-as-a-Service platform in Europe. This initiative represents a major step towards building a federated, sovereign AI infrastructure across the continent. Based on open source technologies “made in Europe”, Fact8ra is able to combine computing resources from eight EU Member States (France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden).
Fact8ra supports the seamless deployment of ready-to-use, private instances of Large Language Models (including Mistral and EuroLLM), providing also a native integration with external catalogs like Hugging Face for access to additional AI models and datasets. Fact8ra leverages the enhanced support for NVIDIA GPUs introduced in the new OpenNebula 7.0 for aggregating GPU servers from European cloud and 5G edge providers such as Arsys, CloudFerro, IONOS, Leaseweb, OVHcloud, Scaleway, StackScale, and Tiscali.
Fact8ra incorporates also an innovative federation model for combining the AI infrastructure capabilities offered by HPC centers and EU-funded AI Factories, supporting workload portability and interoperability with supercomputing facilities at the Gdańsk University of Technology, at the Research Institutes of Sweden, at the University of Latvia, and at Rovira i Virgili University. Fact8ra is based on a sovereign cloud stack for AI that incorporates not only OpenNebula but also other European open source technologies such as openSUSE and MariaDB.
By supporting a cloud-native, multi-tenant environment for AI inference and training, Fact8ra offers a unique technological solution for those individual AI Factories that want to provide SMEs and startups with easy access to public digital infrastructures. More than just a first industrial deployment under the IPCEI Cloud, Fact8ra is a crucial tool for establishing a European ecosystem for sovereign AI along the HPC-cloud-telco continuum, thus speeding up the technical implementation of the EU’s AI Continent Action Plan.
— Alberto P. Martí, Chair of the IPCEI-CIS Industry Facilitation Group
“The Fact8ra initiative demonstrates that, with the right level of support, the European industry can become a global leader in producing the best open source technologies for sovereign AI.”
The full press release can be accessed here.
Funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service through the ONEnextgen Project (UNICO IPCEI-2023-003), and co-funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU through the RRF.
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