Europe’s First
Federated AI Factory
About Fact8ra
In 2023, the European Union approved the Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructures & Services (IPCEI-CIS), a 3 billion EUR initiative for the creation of a European cloud-edge computing continuum. Supported by 12 EU Member States and implemented by more than 120 industrial partners, its main objective is to develop the first interoperable and openly accessible data processing ecosystem in Europe. The IPCEI-CIS is now part of the larger 8ra initiative.
Conceived as a transversal integration pilot under the IPCEI-CIS, Fact8ra offers a multi-tenant AI-as-a-Service platform for the deployment of ready-to-use, private instances of open source Large Language Models. It is built on top of a sovereign AI infrastructure that combines HPC, public cloud, and telco edge resources across the EU. Based on European open source technologies, its initial phase involves the federation of GPU servers located in eight EU Member States.
By supporting a cloud-native, multi-tenant environment for AI inference and training, Fact8ra offers a unique 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.
The initial version of the Fact8ra platform supports AI inference. Future phases of the project will also provide resources for fine-tuning and training of AI models.
INFERENCE
Deploy your AI models across the HPC-Cloud-Telco Continuum.
FINE-TUNING
Customise an AI model using public datasets or your own data.
TRAINING
Use a distributed Edge Cloud Infrastructure to train your AI model.
Catalogue of Open Source LLMs
The first version of Fact8ra supports the deployment of several open source Large Language Models “made in Europe”, providing also a native integration with external catalogs of open source AI models such as Hugging Face and NVIDIA NIM.
Mistral Nemo 12B
LLM built in collaboration with NVIDIA that offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens. It has been trained with quantisation awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss.
License: Apache 2.0
EuroLLM 9B
LLM trained on over 4 trillion tokens of multilingual data across 35 different languages, including all official EU languages, and fine-tuned for instruction following and chat capabilities.
License: Apache 2.0
Salamandra 7B
Transformer-based decoder-only language model pre-trained from scratch on 12.875 trillion tokens of highly curated data. The pre-training corpus contains text in 35 European languages and code.
License: Apache 2.0
Italia 9B
Foundational LLM trained from scratch in Italian on trillions of tokens, in collaboration with CINECA, and designed for companies operating in highly regulated sectors.
License: MIT
Sovereign Cloud Technologies
Europe leads the development of some of the most popular and mature open source technologies in the global tech market, contributing with their success to Europe’s strategic autonomy and digital transformation. Thanks to the new IPCEI-CIS Reference Architecture, a higher degree of mutual integration is now possible.
European open source software plays a crucial role in building a truly sovereign AI infrastructure for Fact8ra. These are some of the main technological components that we have used for this first industrial deployment:
AI Infrastructure Providers
Thanks to its advanced support for NVIDIA GPUs, Fact8ra is able to aggregate infrastructure resources not only from public cloud and 5G edge providers, but also from supercomputing facilities and EU-funded AI Factories. This unique federated architecture for sovereign AI deployments ensures workload portability and interoperability across the whole HPC-cloud-telco continuum.
“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. We have now a unique opportunity to consolidate the industrial ecosystem that Europe needs—a sovereign AI ecosystem that helps to nurture innovation, fostering collaboration among competitors, and mobilizing European open source technologies as practical tools for building Europe’s strategic autonomy. Fact8ra offers not only a solid foundation for the future IPCEIs on Distributed AI and Edge Computing Infrastructure, but also a tangible technological core for the EuroStack”.
Alberto P. Martí
VP of Open Source Innovation @ OpenNebula Systems
Chair of the Industry Facilitation Group @ IPCEI-CIS
“I am glad to see that the IPCEI-CIS is delivering on its mission: to develop solutions that are European, open source, and that enable distributed data processing across the multi-provider cloud-edge continuum. While focusing on Research and Development, IPCEI-CIS is intended to be close to the market and I particularly note how the deployment of IPCEI-CIS integration pilots are demonstrating advanced cloud and edge services and the federation of infrastructure resources across the European Union.
The work of the IPCEI-CIS, as part of the broader 8ra ecosystem, plays a key role in achieving the technological and sovereignty objectives of the AI Continent Action Plan. The plan is about becoming a global leader in Artificial Intelligence, and the IPCEI-CIS provides a unique opportunity for developing a European cloud stack for AI. Together with the AI Factories initiative, the IPCEI-CIS is a crucial source of support for those European SMEs that need to leverage AI infrastructures along the cloud-edge continuum“.
Thibaut Kleiner
Director for Future Networks @ DG CONNECT (European Commission)
Join Fact8ra
A growing number of partners are contributing to expanding the sovereign AI ecosystem around Fact8ra with additional technological components and infrastructure resources from across the European Union, and beyond…
