VEZILKA Meets the Slovenian AI Factory
On 22 October 2026, in Ljubljana, Prof. Dimitar Trajanov, PhD, Project Director of VEZILKA, met with representatives of the Slovenian AI Factory (SLAIF) to exchange experiences in developing and operating AI Factory services. Professor Trajanov presented VEZILKA, North Macedonia’s AI Factory Antenna, highlighting its mission, access to European advanced computing resources, and free support for companies, startups, researchers and public institutions across five strategic sectors: healthcare, energy, language and culture, agriculture, and public administration. The SLAIF team also shared its experience in organising and delivering AI Factory services.
The two sides shared their experience across the key areas of running an AI Factory. On training, they compared how courses, workshops, and talent programmes are designed and delivered to researchers, students, and professionals. On infrastructure, they discussed how computing resources are planned, operated, and made available to users, from European supercomputers to local GPU systems. On services, they exchanged practices on reaching and onboarding users, organising expert support and mentoring, and helping companies, startups, and public institutions move from an idea to a working AI solution. They also discussed engaging industry and the public sector, and building a community around each factory. Both sides found the exchange very useful, with lessons that each can apply directly in its own work.
During the visit, Professor Trajanov also toured FRIDA, the new data centre of the Faculty of Computer and Information Science (FRI), University of Ljubljana, opened in June 2026. Housed in a modular container on the roof of the faculty, with hybrid air and direct-to-chip liquid cooling, FRIDA brings together 104 GPU accelerators, including the latest NVIDIA Blackwell B200 and B300 generation, and reaches up to 708 petaflops of lower-precision AI performance. It supports research in machine learning and large language models, including the Slovenian language model GaMS, and is open to companies and the public sector for testing and prototyping AI solutions. Seeing how a faculty-built facility connects academic research with industry offered valuable insight for VEZILKA’s own plans for local compute in North Macedonia.
The meeting laid the groundwork for continued cooperation between VEZILKA and SLAIF and strengthened the ties between North Macedonia and Slovenia within the European AI Factory ecosystem.