FAQ

IT4LIA AI Factory is the strategic initiative aimed at transforming the national and European Artificial Intelligence landscape through cutting-edge supercomputing infrastructure and a comprehensive portfolio of services available to companies, startups, public administrations and researchers.

IT4LIA AI Factory is aimed at all private and public innovators, in particular SMEs and startups, universities, research groups and centers, and public administrations, with the goal of helping them develop an AI system, model or solution by removing the main barriers that hold back adoption: upfront costs, technical complexity, and a lack of computing resources and in-house skills.

By visiting the “What we can do for you” page, you can book an appointment with our AI and HPC experts. You will be contacted within 10 days.

Access to IT4LIA’s services is free for eligible startups, SMEs, public administrations and academic institutions. Customized offers are available for other innovation stakeholders.

There is no limit. You have until 31 March 2028.

Yes. The consortium follows high security standards. The national and European technological infrastructures are reliable and support projects that require compliance, privacy and advanced controls. Data is never used to train third-party models.

Yes, IT4LIA AI Factory’s services are designed to support organizations at different levels of maturity, including those taking their first steps in adopting artificial intelligence. The advisory services are specifically designed to help identify opportunities and define a development path.

No. We handle requests from all sectors, but we provide additional, more specific services for the Agritech & Agrifood, Cybersecurity, Manufacturing and Earth (Climate, Weather and Environment) areas.

Yes. You can access IT4LIA AI Factory’s services even without your own datasets. IT4LIA can support you in sourcing data, identifying suitable sources, or generating synthetic data, to enable experimentation, development, validation and testing of AI models.

The IT4LIA AI Factory project offers 2 types of calls: European calls and Italian calls. The European call is open to European and Italian users and includes only access to the EuroHPC supercomputer. The Italian calls are open exclusively to Italian users and include access to the EuroHPC supercomputer plus the full portfolio of services, or a services-only package.

IT4LIA’s services are provided under national calls and are intended for entities that meet the requirements set out in those calls, generally Italian companies and organisations, or those with an operational base in Italy. The HPC and AI resources of the European AI Factories network, on the other hand, are also accessible through the European EuroHPC calls.

Access is granted by booking an appointment with our AI and HPC experts on the “What we can do for you” page. During a dedicated assessment meeting, your project idea is explored in depth and a customised package is defined based on your needs, built around your use case.

Yes. The same organisation can access IT4LIA AI Factory’s services with multiple project ideas, use cases or proofs of concept. Each proposal is assessed independently and can result in a dedicated or customised support package, depending on the project’s objectives, level of maturity and technical requirements.

A customised package is defined during the assessment meeting. Each package can combine multiple services depending on your needs, and may include, for example, supercomputing hours together with compliance or synthetic data generation services.

Yes. Several services cover this topic, for example: legal triage to check risk classification, a compliance roadmap, and support in accessing regulatory sandboxes.

IT4LIA offers four freely accessible services on its website, free of charge and open to everyone: training courses, a repository of open datasets and models, the SUK matchmaking platform, and the LinkUp matchmaking service.

Throughout the year, IT4LIA offers a range of in-person and online training courses aimed at a broad audience, from technical profiles to more managerial ones, covering various topics related to AI and HPC.

In its repository, IT4LIA makes tools, models and resources developed through its activities available to everyone, including, among other things, datasets, pre-trained models and frameworks for AI on HPC.

You can find all the FAQs about the SUK Matchmaking platform on its dedicated page.

You can find all the FAQs about the LinkUp Matchmaking platform on its dedicated page.