A new artificial intelligence (AI) data centre worth more than EUR 8 million is being developed in Reghin, Transylvania, with the first NVIDIA servers expected to become operational before the end of the year.
The project, led by Romanian IT company Expert IT, will initially install 56 high-performance NVIDIA B300 graphics processing units (GPUs) across seven servers, G4Media reported. The company is also considering a much larger expansion involving another 512 GPUs. The investment is part of a wider EUR 10 million development planned by Expert IT on a 1.7-hectare site in Reghin, Mureș County.
56 NVIDIA GPUs to power AI models
The first phase of the project will cost more than EUR 8 million and involves not only the servers and GPUs but also the electricity supply and cooling infrastructure needed to operate them.
Expert IT chief executive Mihai Farcaș Dan said the 56-GPU order is the largest purchase of its kind in Romania this year. The company has already completed discussions about a potential expansion involving a further 512 graphics cards.
“The servers are due to become operational this year and are intended for developing large models,” Farcaș Dan told Radio Târgu Mureș.
The company has been developing its investment plans in Reghin for around 12 years, with AI becoming an increasingly important focus over the past three to four years. Details of how the first phase of the investment is being financed have not yet been disclosed.
If you missed it: Self-driving cars in Hungary: How close is the country to truly driverless roads?
AI could help doctors diagnose patients faster
One of the project’s main areas of focus will be healthcare. Expert IT is considering working with Romanian clinics and universities to develop AI systems capable of supporting communication between doctors and patients, assisting medical professionals and analysing medical imaging.
The company hopes such systems could eventually help speed up diagnoses in areas such as oncology and cardiology, where rapid identification of serious conditions can be particularly important.
The planned AI models could, for example, analyse large datasets and medical images to identify patterns and support doctors in reaching a diagnosis more quickly. The project could therefore involve healthcare and academic institutions from several parts of Romania.
Never miss a headline: join our Messenger group!
Transylvania is becoming an AI data centre hotspot
The Reghin project is far from the only major AI-related data centre development underway in Transylvania. In Luna, Cluj County, US-based DriverAI and Romanian partner Leviatan Group are planning an 80-megawatt facility known as the Quantum AI Data Center.
The first phase has been estimated at around US$1 billion, with the centre intended primarily to provide computing capacity for running and training AI models. That project is still in the preparation stage, however, and the selected site is currently involved in a legal dispute following a challenge by a business using an adjacent plot.
Mureș County is also preparing another major data centre in Vidrasău. The Mureș County Council and Mureș Industrial Park are planning a facility costing almost RON 240 million (around EUR 45 million).
The approximately 1,700-square-metre centre would provide data storage, processing and server hosting, as well as computing capacity for artificial intelligence applications. Funding for the project has reportedly already been secured.
Meanwhile, the George Emil Palade University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș is developing its own high-performance computing infrastructure.
Its nearly RON 60 million (EUR 11.2 million) DEEP_AI project will support research based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and large-scale data analysis, including work on communications security and the detection of cyberattacks.
Romania wants to become a regional AI hub
The developments in Transylvania are part of a much wider push to expand Romania’s AI infrastructure. According to Telex, Romania is also planning the Black Sea AI Gigafactory, a huge project designed to establish the country as a regional centre for artificial intelligence. The planned facilities in Cernavodă and Doicești would eventually host more than 100,000 AI processors.
One of the biggest challenges facing such projects is securing enough electricity to power the enormous computing capacity required by modern AI systems.
