The Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, is getting a modular data center.

The containerized data center will be located on the rooftop of the faculty, and is being supplied by NTR Inženiring.

As reported by Sta Science, the data center will cost around €2.5 million ($2.57m), and will be used to advance AI research including the development of a Slovenian LLM.

€870,000 ($895,930) of the funding has been provided by the Research and Innovation Agency, with the remainder provided by the faculty itself.

Details about the capacity of the data center, or the hardware it will house, have not been shared. DCD has reached out for more information.

"With the new data center, our faculty will gain on-site access to a supercomputer, enabling our researchers to perform calculations and train deep neural network models more efficiently," said Dean Mojca Ciglarič.

PoVeJMo (Let's say it) is the faculty's project to develop an open-access LLM. It will be trained on billions of words from diverse sources, and trained using the data center.

NTR Inženiring was previously involved in the development of the Vega and Maister supercomputers. NTR's director Primož Mahorič said: "This facility integrates various classical and supercomputing technologies while achieving exceptionally high energy density through the combined use of air and direct liquid cooling."

Slovenia's Vega supercomputer was inaugurated in 2021 with 6.9 petaflops of performance.

The country has a small data center market, the majority of which are in Ljubljana. Operators include Telemach, Datacenter.si, Perftech, and SoftNet.