Fastweb and Vodafone will increase the computing power of the Nvidia supercomputer the group is building in Italy. The upgrade is scheduled for the coming weeks, with new NVL8 B300 systems added, and the extra capacity will serve AI services for businesses and public administration.
The supercomputer is part of the infrastructure the group is developing in Italy, where the data used by its models is also hosted. The project is not only about hardware: the company has integrated several Nvidia tools to work on AI models after training, checking their performance and improving it over time.
The announcement was made at the GTC Berlin AI conference, where the group presented the expansion as a step toward sovereign AI, meaning AI developed and hosted with infrastructure and data under national or European control. With this project Italy aims to position itself as a European hub for sovereign AI, offering companies computing capacity that does not depend exclusively on non-European suppliers.
The supercomputer dates back to an earlier phase: the NeXXt AI Factory infrastructure, based on an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD system, went live in 2024 together with the first release of MIIA, the national language model developed by Fastweb. That launch came with agreements with the Gruppo Mondadori, Istat and the universities La Sapienza and Bicocca in Milan to expand the dataset used to train the model. The new upgrade therefore builds on a path already underway, moving from construction to concrete service offering.
The new capacity will make AI services easier for businesses and public administration to access, groups that increasingly want models trained and run on Italian soil. For customers, the gain is more computing power to run and customize models, with data staying in Italy.
The sovereign AI race also involves other operators: Fastweb recently signed an agreement with Cineca to speed up the adoption of generative AI in companies, while FiberCop's plan to turn telephone exchanges into distributed computing nodes aims to bring AI closer to customers. The upgrade announced with Vodafone is the next step: more concrete power for the market in the coming months.
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