Slovenian AI Factory (SLAIF) — A National University-Industry Consortium for AI Skills and Compute

In March 2025, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking selected Slovenia's "Slovenian AI Factory" (SLAIF) as one of six winning proposals in its second AI Factory call, pairing a new national supercomputer with a formal skills-building consortium. The project is led by IZUM together with the University of Ljubljana, University of Maribor, University of Nova Gorica, University of Primorska, the Faculty of Information Studies in Novo Mesto, the Jožef Stefan Institute, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia, and Ljubljana's Technology Park, and is jointly funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, Slovenia's Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, and its Ministry of Digital Transformation.
The new supercomputer — sited at a purpose-built datacentre on the Dravske elektrarne Maribor hydropower plant campus and powered by renewable hydroelectric energy — is designed to deliver 10 exaflops of mixed-precision performance and is expected to be operational in early 2027, with a further hardware upgrade planned for 2028-2029. Alongside the infrastructure, the consortium commits to "specialised AI training programmes targeting students, researchers, and professionals," delivered through university partnerships, internships, hackathons and industry-led workshops, aimed at building a domestic AI skills pipeline for green transition, digital transformation, medicine and scientific-research applications.
As of this writing the facility itself will not be operational until 2027, so no training cohorts, participant numbers or skills outcomes have yet been reported; this practice is included as a verified, competitively funded institutional commitment rather than a demonstrated result.

Read the full analysis: https://www.sling.si/en/slaif/