Malta’s AI Factory Antenna CALYPSO is accelerating Malta and Europe’s leadership in artificial intelligence, with the goal of making AI-optimized supercomputing more accessible across member states.
Europe’s ambition to become a world leader in trusted, human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer limited to strategies and policy statements. That is being translated into infrastructure and coordinated investments across the continent. One of the most important means of enabling this transition is the creation of the AI Factory Antenna. These are national hubs designed to directly connect the region’s innovation ecosystem to Europe’s most advanced AI-optimized supercomputing resources. Within this framework, Malta has been officially selected by the EuroHPC joint venture to host one of the 13 newly established AI Factory antennas in Europe. This selection represents an important milestone in Malta’s digital transformation journey and strengthens Malta’s role within the European Artificial Intelligence and High Performance Computing (HPC) network.
What is AI Factory Antenna?
The AI Factory Antenna Model reflects Europe’s deliberate choice to ensure that access to frontier AI infrastructure is distributed through coordinated national access points, rather than being limited to a few large Member States. These antennas are designed to act as a bridge between regional ecosystems and continent-wide computing capabilities, allowing innovation to flourish across the region. Malta’s participation through CALYPSO places it firmly within this pan-European structure.
calypso
The Maltese antenna, named CALYPSO (Computational AI Factory Link Yielding Performance, Services, and Outreach), will be led by the Malta Digital Innovation Agency and will formally collaborate with the PHAROS AI Factory in Greece. The core AI-optimized supercomputing infrastructure is hosted at the AI Factory level, while antennas such as CALYPSO provide onboarding, technical support, training, governance frameworks, and coordination mechanisms for domestic users. In practical terms, this means that Maltese start-ups, SMEs, researchers and public bodies can gain secure remote access to EuroHPC AI supercomputing power, along with algorithmic support and carefully selected datasets, without having to host or maintain such infrastructure locally.
Malta’s selection forms part of the wider EuroHPC AI Factories initiative, launched to accelerate Europe’s leadership in artificial intelligence and make AI-optimized supercomputing more accessible across member states. The European Union is investing around 55 million euros in the AI Factory Antenna, with funding matched by participating countries. Malta’s CALYPSO Antenna represents a strategic investment of €10 million, positioning the country not just as a beneficiary of Europe’s digital policy, but as an active contributor to Europe’s AI ambitions. This investment signals a long-term commitment to advanced computing.
holistic approach
At its core, CALYPSO is designed to bridge advanced infrastructure and real-world applications. By linking with Greece’s PHAROS, which hosts AI-optimized supercomputing resources, CALYPSO will enable organizations in Malta to train, test and deploy complex AI models at a scale that would otherwise be difficult. This is especially beneficial for startups and small businesses. Through CALYPSO, these barriers are significantly lowered and innovation cycles can be accelerated while maintaining strong oversight and governance.
Antenna recognizes that infrastructure alone is not enough. Access to computing must be complemented by skills, tools, and organizational support. CALYPSO therefore integrates technical assistance, algorithmic guidance and structured training into its service delivery. This holistic approach allows organizations in the region to not only experiment with AI technologies, but also move forward with deployment, expansion, and commercialization in a controlled and sustainable manner.
Sectoral focus
A key element of CALYPSO’s strategy is its sectoral focus. The initial focus on finance, transport and health reflects areas where artificial intelligence can have an immediate and significant impact, addressing pressing national and European challenges. In finance, advanced machine learning and generative AI models can support fraud detection, risk modeling, regulatory compliance, and personalized services. These applications require large amounts of computational resources, especially when models need to be trained on large datasets and updated frequently to address evolving threats and regulatory requirements.
In the transportation sector, AI has the potential to transform logistics, traffic management, and infrastructure maintenance. Predictive models can optimize traffic flow, reduce congestion, and reduce emissions, and AI-driven analytics can support more efficient public transport planning and asset management. For a closely connected island nation, such efficiencies have clear benefits.
The medical field is another area where CALYPSO’s capabilities could have a major impact. Access to AI-optimized supercomputing enables advanced medical research, large-scale data analysis, and the development of diagnostic support tools that rely on complex models and large amounts of data. From population-level health analytics to digital twins and personalized medicine, these applications rely on computational power far beyond traditional IT infrastructure. CALYPSO provides a pathway to realize such innovations within a secure and compliant European framework.
Importantly, CALYPSO is conceived with trust and compliance at its core. Europe’s approach to artificial intelligence is defined not only by its technological ambitions, but also by its commitment to ethical, transparent and responsible AI. Antenna’s roadmap focuses on secure data governance, controlled access mechanisms, and alignment with the European regulatory framework, including the principles underlying the upcoming EU AI law. By incorporating these considerations from the beginning, CALYPSO ensures that innovation is not pursued at the expense of trust or social value.
skill development
Skills development is also fundamental to this initiative. The availability of supercomputing resources creates immediate demand for AI literacy, data science expertise, and advanced engineering skills. CALYPSO addresses this need through structured training programs, user onboarding guides, and continuous capacity-building efforts tailored to the HPC and AI context. This focus on human capital will enable Maltese organizations to make the most of their infrastructure while building a sustainable talent pipeline for the future.
Strengthening Malta’s role in Europe’s digital ecosystem
From an ecosystem perspective, CALYPSO strengthens Malta’s position as a hub of digital excellence and innovation. By embedding national ecosystems within Europe’s broader network of AI factories, national competence centers and European digital innovation hubs, Antenna fosters collaboration, interoperability and knowledge exchange.
The antenna model also accommodates the concentration of advanced infrastructure in Europe. By distributing access through coordinated national hubs, Europe will ensure that innovation capacity is more evenly distributed, regional disparities are reduced and overall resilience is strengthened. For Malta, this means that geographic size is no longer a constraint when participating in frontier AI development. Instead, countries can focus on building high-value applications, niche expertise, and cross-border collaborations.
Over time, CALYPSO is expected to foster new forms of collaboration between the public sector, academia, and industry. Public organizations can explore AI-driven approaches to service delivery and policy design, researchers can access the computational resources needed for cutting-edge experiments, and businesses can develop and validate AI solutions with global potential. The convergence of actors around shared infrastructure creates the conditions for sustained innovation and long-term economic impact.
CALYPSO’s strategic importance extends beyond its borders. Each AI Factory Antenna contributes to a broader European vision in which AI capabilities are collaboratively developed, collectively managed and responsibly deployed. Through its collaboration with PHAROS and integration into the EuroHPC framework, CALYPSO strengthens Europe’s ability to compete globally, while staying true to its unique approach to digital sovereignty and trusted technology.
Malta’s new digital era
The launch of CALYPSO AI Factory Antenna is therefore much more than just a new digital infrastructure project. This is a pivotal moment in Malta’s integration into Europe’s AI and high-performance computing ecosystem. By combining access to world-class supercomputing with skills development, governance and collaboration, CALYPSO positions Malta firmly in Europe’s trusted AI future. In doing so, we will not only benefit from Europe’s AI ambitions, but also actively contribute to shaping them.
Please note: This is a commercial profile
This article will also be published in the quarterly magazine issue 25.
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