On 12 May 2026, the IT4I AI Factory hub was officially opened, located near IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center and VSB – Technical University of Ostrava. The hub will offer AI startups, small and medium-sized enterprises, and public institutions a shared working environment, space for workshops, networking, and professional meetings, and serve as a point of contact for accessing LUMI AI Factory services.  

The IT4I AI Factory hub is part of a network of similar shared workspaces operating under the umbrella of the LUMI AI Factory consortium, which brings together partners from six European countries, including IT4Innovations from the Czech Republic, to support the European artificial intelligence ecosystem. The hub connects to various parts of this ecosystem and serves as a signpost, making navigation easier and directing interested parties to downstream services and expert support.

The IT4I AI Factory hub comprises four specialised spaces designed for different purposes. The largest part, located in the VIVA building of the Moravian-Silesian Innovation Centre (MSIC), serves as a shared workspace and a centre for hosting workshops and community meetings.

The other three spaces are located in the IT4Innovations building. The first is the AI Campus, dedicated to developing students' talent. The other two are reserved as consultation rooms for meetings and strategic discussions with partner organisations and companies.

The hub's services are primarily intended for AI startups and small and medium-sized enterprises that can utilise LUMI AI Factory services, for instance, through supercomputing capacity for training AI models. In total, 32 workstations will be available for long-term work, alongside the option to make use of short-term, single-day visits.

During the opening ceremony, representatives from the LUMI AI Factory presented the project's strategic vision and its role in connecting local innovators with the European AI ecosystem. European AI ecosystem. The programme also featured presentations by representatives of companies that are already collaborating with the LUMI AI Factory:

  • Marianna Barčák Hajná from Vectorama presented 'Albert', an AI assistant for railway infrastructure designers.
  • Vít Liechtenstein presented the MyPaperWork project, which utilises the LUMI supercomputer to train multilingual models for analysing legal texts within the EU.

The significance of the hub for both regional and national competitiveness was further emphasised by Lenka Kučerová on behalf of prg.ai and Dalibor Mráz on behalf of the CERNA.AI platform. Tomáš Martinovič from IT4Innovations built on these topics by introducing the AI Training App, built on the LEXIS Platform, which simplifies the training of artificial intelligence models on supercomputers.