👋 Welcome to the Community
Welcome to the first edition of the Serbian AI Factory Antenna Insights, your community update on the technologies, architectures, and innovations shaping AI Factories.
The European AI Factories ecosystem is a European initiative designed to give businesses, researchers, startups, and public organizations access to powerful AI computing infrastructure, technical expertise, data resources, and support services to develop and deploy AI. Led by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking and supported by the European Commission and participating countries, the initiative aims to make Europe more competitive in AI, strengthen technological sovereignty, and reduce dependence on computing infrastructure outside Europe. Nowadays, AI Factories are transforming how we build, train, and deploy intelligence at scale.
In this edition, we're exploring the latest news from the Serbian AI Factory Antenna (SAIFA) project.
In this issue:
- 📰 Serbian AI Factory Antenna (SAIFA) News
- ⚡ Serbian AI Factory Antenna (SAIFA) Challenges
- 🔬SAIFA Infrastructure and AI Services
- 💡 Community Insights & Related Activities
- 📅 Upcoming Events
📰 01 | SAIFA News
What's Happening in the Serbian AI Factory Antenna Ecosystem?
The Serbian Artificial Intelligence Factory Antenna (SAIFA) is a co-funded project by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement 101263280. It aims to become a national hub for AI development and testing, supporting the full lifecycle of AI innovation—from model preparation and dataset curation to deployment.
The SAIFA project officially started in May 2026, however, the team, composed of
- School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade [ETF], Coordinator: Prof. dr. Boško Nikolić
- Institute of Physics [IMP], Technical Coordinator: Dr. Dušan Vudragović, Primary contact: Dr. Marija Mitrović Dankulov
- Institute Mihajlo Pupin [IMP], Primary contact: Dr. Valentina Janev
- Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia [IVI], Primary contact: Dragiša Mišović
- Faculty of Science, University of Kragujevac [FSUKG], Primary contact: Miloš Ivanović
- Institute of Molecular Genetics and Genetic Engineering, University of Belgrade [IMGGE], Primary contact: Branko Tomić
- Metropolitan University – Faculty of Economics, Finance and Administration [FEFA] as third party, Primary contact: Prof. dr. Ernest Vlačič
- Innovation Center, School of Electrical Engineering – University of Belgrade [ICEF], Primary contact: Prof. dr. Milica Đurić-Jovičić
has started the cooperation earlier. See moments from activities around the SAIFA kick-off event below.
SAIFA Team at the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications, Government of the Republic of Serbia, March 2026
SAIFA Kick-off Meeting, Palace of Science, May 2026
🔗 Explore further: SAIFA News
⚡02 | SAIFA Challenges
What's National AI Stakeholder and Market Landscape?
SAIFA addresses the challenges of the Serbian Artificial Intelligence research and innovation ecosystem, business and start-up ecosystem, as well as the overall Artificial Intelligence user community, and provides supportive Artificial Intelligence-oriented services via the national and EU supercomputing facilities. The SAIFA project demonstrates a strong and comprehensive alignment with Serbia’s national AI strategy, data governance frameworks, HPC access policies, and startup/SME development programs. Its goal is to create impact in different industry sectors including Energy, Health, Environment and Culture and language.
The following national strategies are reflected in the SAIFA objectives:
- Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence in the Republic of Serbia for the Period 2025–2030
- Industrial Policy Strategy of the Republic of Serbia for the Period 2021–2030
- Strategy for the development of the startup ecosystem
Community engagement: One of SAIFA's goals is to conduct a comprehensive assessment of Serbia’s emerging AI ecosystem, combining desk-based analysis with field research (interviews with stakeholders and focus groups).
🔗 Explore further: Strategic Sectors, Industry specific events and Deliverable 2.1 National AI Stakeholder and Market Landscape Report
🔬 03 | SAIFA Infrastructure and AI Services
What can SAIFA offer to Stakeholders?
SAIFA ensures access to computing power aligned with European standards. By leveraging the computational capabilities of the PARADOX HPC cluster (operated by IPB) and the AI computing cluster at ITE, SAIFA offers a development environment that can support complex and large-scale AI workloads. Containerization, Kubernetes-based orchestration, and smart scheduling systems ensure that users, regardless of background or technical expertise, can efficiently utilize these resources. SAIFA is part of the European AI Factories network and will thus enable easier access to and use of the EuroHPC infrastructure, especially the Pharos AI Factory in Greece and the IT4LIA AI Factory in Italy.
SAIFA AI Gateway: SAIFA will ensure a unified access point for AI resources, tools, and services through the AI Gateway that is currently under development. The Gateway is conceived as a modular integration and control layer rather than a monolithic platform. Mature components are reused for identity management, cataloguing, notebooks, model management, execution, storage, monitoring and learning. SAIFA-specific development is concentrated on the unified portal, common metadata and authorisation rules, quota and accounting logic, the HPC bridge, audit, and federation adapters.
SAIFA Use Cases: Currently under development are 23 Use Case Scenarios covering language and culture, biomedicine and health, energy and manufacturing, environment, and cross-domain adoption. A representative set of system use cases specifies
the principal interactions for authentication, discovery, data and model management, compute jobs, inference, experiments, training, federation and support. These descriptions remain subject to validation and prioritisation with domain owners, infrastructure operators and user-support teams.
🔗 Explore further: HPC Infrastructure and Deliverable 3.1 Design of the AI Gateway
💡 04 | Further Insights & Related Projects
What else the SAIFA Community Is Building
SAIFA proactively monitor and coordinates activities across a broad spectrum of national and European initiatives such as EuroHPC National Competence Centres (NCCs), EuroHPC Centres of Excellence (CoEs), Testing and Experimentation Facilities (TEFs), European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs), the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and European Data Spaces.
For the first six months of the project, we're highlighting:
- collaboration with the HPC Community, see Current Challenges and Future Directions in HPC Ecosystem, June 2026
- collaboration with the EOSC Community, see the forthcoming 1st International Workshop on Domain-Specific Agentic AI (DSAAI 2026)
- involvement of SAIFA researchers in panel discussions and events organized by other projects in Serbia, including
- 6. SERBIAN ROAD CONGRESS / 2026 (Panel: AI in Road and Traffic Engineering)
- First German-Serbian Technology and Innovation Forum (panel discussion “AI in the Industry”)
🔗 Explore further: Forthcoming Events
📅 05 | What's Coming Up?
Connect, Learn, and Collaborate
Mark your calendar for these upcoming community activities:
- Webinar — 23 Oct 2026, Distributed Cloud/Edge AI for Connected Robotics, October 2026
- Training School - DeepTech & Innovation Online School, October 2026
- Focus Group — 28 October 2026, Building the Future of Health: Experiences with Applied AI, October 2026
- Workshops at International Conferences
- Clustering event — 15 and 16 December 2026, Serbia in the European AI Factories Ecosystem, December 2026
Please let us know of further opportunities and events the community should attend.
🤝 Stay Connected
AI Factories are built on more than infrastructure. They're built on shared knowledge, collaboration, and the people moving the ecosystem forward.
Join the conversation, share your experience, and help shape the future of AI infrastructure.
🌐 Community: https://www.saifa.rs
💬 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company-saifa-rs
📚 Resources: https://zenodo.org/communities/saifa/records
📩 Contact: info@saifa.rs
Thank you for being part of the Serbian AI Factory Antenna community!
Build together. Learn together. Scale intelligence.
SAIFA AI Factory Insight | A newsletter by the community, for the community.