FILE PHOTO: Artificial Intelligence words are seen in this illustration taken March 31, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
MILAN (Reuters) - Italian AI startup iGenius aims to complete a major data centre project in the south of the country in the summer, using Nvidia technology and requiring a $1 billion investment spread over five years, its CEO said.
CEO Uljan Sharka told Reuters the cost of the project had prompted the start-up to extend a funding round from an initial target of 650 million euros.
Sharka said the project's new supercomputer will be able to execute "115 billion of billions" of calculations per second. He said until last year the best supercomputers in Europe could handle around "0.5 billion of billions" calculations per second.
"We have ambitions to go beyond that, thanks to the latest generation of chips," Sharka said, adding Nvidia's "Blackwell" chips being used had 35 times more computing power than their predecessors, but used 25 times less energy.
The data centre will house about 80 of Nvidia's most powerful servers, called GB200 NVL72 machines, each with 72 of the tech company's Blackwell chips in them.
"Keeping the current pace, we aim to complete the project this summer," Sharka said, adding iGenius had picked southern Italy as a location thanks to a surplus of renewable energy capacity.
Founded in 2016, iGenius is one of the few AI startups in Europe valued at more than $1 billion. It competes with France's Mistral and Germany's DeepL.
Also on Thursday iGenius launched Colosseum 355B, a large language model built with the latest Nvidia technology for customers in highly regulated industries that have special data protection needs.
Tight legislation and compliance requirements hamper the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in regulated industries.
Sharka said iGenius differs from rivals such as OpenAI in that it develops open source AI software models for chatbots it sells to companies who then run the models on their own infrastructure to keep the data in-house.
For the LLM model released on Thursday, iGenius is already in contact with potential users in the financial services, heavy industry sectors as well as governments, he said.
(Reporting by Elvira Pollina and Valentina Za, editing by Gianluca Semeraro and Jane Merriman)
