After launching in the USA, Milestone’s Project Hafnia is now engaged in Europe with the city of Genoa, Italy. The aim is to develop AI-driven solutions to enhance traffic management systems and create smarter cities with high-quality, regulation compliant video data trained with NVIDIA NeMo Curator on NVIDIA DGX Cloud.
Milestone is one of the early adopters of the newly announced NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI, a reference framework for optimizing city operations with digital twins and AI agents. Milestone is also expanding its data platform with NVIDIA Cosmos to generate synthetic video data from real world inputs. Leveraging both real and synthetic data, Milestone will build and train vision language models (VLMs) responsibly. European cloud provider Nebius will provide the required GPU compute to train the models.
AI opens up new horizons for smarter, more efficient cities with Project Hafnia’s data platform – from intelligent traffic and transportation management to better safety and security for people and property.
VLMs learn to map the relationships between text data and visual data such as images or videos, allowing these AI-models to generate summaries and insights from visual inputs. Milestone Systems is working with NVIDIA to empower European cities like Genoa to build and fine-tune computer vision and AI applications on a foundation of fully compliant and ethically sourced data. The project is rooted in regulatory integrity, data diversity, and AI relevance, aligning with the EU’s legal frameworks, including GDPR and the AI Act. This ensures both transparency and fairness in the development of AI technologies.
“I’m proud that with Project Hafnia we are introducing the world’s first platform to meet the EU’s regulatory standards, powered by NVIDIA technology. With Nebius as our European cloud provider, we can now enable compliant, high-quality video data for training vision AI models — fully anchored in Europe. This marks an important step forward in supporting the EU’s commitment to transparency, fairness, and regulatory oversight in AI and technology — the foundation for responsible AI innovation,” says Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone.
Milestone’s Project Hafnia provides the missing link for developing video-centric AI innovation with a fully compliant and ethically sourced data library for fine tuning classical video analytics models and VLMs.
The VLM’s accuracy and performance optimizations are tuned for running on NVIDIA GPUs and in NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS).
First service offering trained on transportation data from Genoa
Project Hafnia now offers a fully European Visual Language Model for transportation management. The VLM is powered by NVIDIA and trained on a large volume of responsibly sourced and compliant transportation data from Genoa, Italy.
“AI is achieving extraordinary results, unthinkable until recently, and the research in the area is in constant development. We enthusiastically joined forces with Project Hafnia to allow developers to access fundamental video data for training new Vision AI models. This data-driven approach is a key principle in the Three-Year Plan for Information Technology, aiming to promote digital transformation in Italy and particularly within the Italian Public Administration,” says Andrea Sinisi, Information Systems Officer, City of Genoa.
While the focus of these collaborations is initially on video data, the framework is designed to scale across multiple domains and modalities, enabling future expansion and adaptation improving the value of the data. Both the compliant dataset and the fine-tuned VLM will be made available to the cities using Project Hafnia through a controlled access license model, facilitating Europe’s AI ambitions without compromising ethical standards.
Nebius to serve as European cloud solution
NVIDIA cloud provider, Nebius, will serve as the EU-based cloud solution for Project Hafnia’s collaboration with Genoa. Choosing Nebius as a sovereign cloud provider ensures full compliance with European data protection regulations, supports digital sovereignty objectives and guarantees that sensitive public-sector data remains securely within EU jurisdiction.
“Project Hafnia is exactly the kind of real-world, AI-at-scale challenge Nebius was built for,” says Roman Chernin, Chief Business Officer of Nebius.“Supporting AI development today requires infrastructure engineered for high-throughput, high-resilience workloads, with precise control over where data lives and how it’s handled. From our EU-based data centers to our deep integration with NVIDIA’s AI stack, we’ve built a platform that meets the highest standards for performance, privacy and transparency.”
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