Dr. Marija Mitrovic Dankulov from HPC Serbia appeared on Newsmax Balkans TV to discuss the upcoming SAIFA - Serbian Artificial Intelligence Factory Antenna project. In the interview, Marija highlights Serbia's part in the EU's initiative to create a network of AI Factories and antennas across Europe by 2026. She describes these as "supercomputing resources where you can trace the entire lifecycle of an AI solution, from start to finish", including data processing, model training, and evaluation. Each factory acts as an innovation hub that brings together universities, institutes, businesses, and the public sector to speed up AI development.
Asked why Serbia was chosen, she emphasizes that "we have a pretty strong IT sector that is developing very rapidly", and that European partners recognized the country's potential and aim to "help us further strengthen our ecosystem". The Institute of Physics Belgrade and the University of Belgrade School of Electrical Engineering form Serbia’s national center of competence for supercomputing, contributing both "knowledge and skills we already have, along with direct access to computer resources".
Serbia's AI Factory Antenna will focus on four main areas — "culture and language, health, energy and environmental protection", as well as cybersecurity — building on strategies aligned with partner factories in Italy (IT4LIA AI Factory) and Greece (Pharos AI Factory). Its primary purpose, she notes, is to "help our industry in developing artificial intelligence solutions more quickly, safely, and effortlessly". Through cooperation with European partners, Serbian researchers and companies will gain access to EU computing resources and datasets, strengthening both academia and industry.
Dr. Mitrović Dankulov emphasizes that "we are actually already creators in a way", but that the new ecosystem will help locally developed technologies reach "Europe first, followed by America and China". She underlines the importance of ethics and responsibility, noting that Serbia is "prepared – we have all the essentials for such development", and that the EU AI Act ensures projects remain "ethical and dedicated to the explainability of the AI model itself". The conversation concludes with her optimistic remark that "the future is arriving now".
