Milestone & Genoa launch EU-compliant AI for smart cities

Milestone has commenced work on Project Hafnia in Europe, collaborating with the city of Genoa, Italy, to develop AI-driven solutions for traffic management and urban infrastructure using NVIDIA technology.

The project's primary objective is to use artificial intelligence to enhance city operations by leveraging regulation-compliant video data, ensuring alignment with European legal frameworks, including GDPR and the EU's AI Act. Project Hafnia, after its launch in the United States, will provide high-quality video data that have been processed using NVIDIA NeMo Curator on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud platform.

Milestone is adopting the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI, which is a reference framework designed to optimise city operations through digital twins and AI agents. In addition to this, Milestone is expanding its proprietary data platform using NVIDIA Cosmos. This approach enables the generation of synthetic video data based on real-world inputs, combining both real and synthetic datasets to build and train vision language models (VLMs) responsibly.

The company has engaged Nebius, a European-based cloud provider, to supply the GPU compute required for the training of these models. This partnership is intended to ensure that all data processing and storage remain fully compliant with European data protection regulations, while supporting digital sovereignty objectives and keeping sensitive public sector data strictly within EU jurisdiction.

Urban AI applications

Project Hafnia seeks to harness the potential of VLMs, which are AI models capable of mapping relationships between visual data—such as images or videos—and corresponding text. This enables the models to generate summaries and insights from visual sources, which can be applied across multiple domains including transportation, safety, and security within city environments.

Emphasising the importance of regulatory compliance and ethical data sourcing, the project aims to support cities throughout Europe in building and refining computer vision and AI applications that align with the region's standards for privacy, transparency, and fairness.

"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.

The company states that the compliant and ethically sourced data library enabled by Project Hafnia provides the necessary foundation for developing advanced video analytics models and vision language models. The models are configured for optimal performance on NVIDIA GPUs and are compatible with NVIDIA AI Blueprint frameworks focused on video search and summarisation (VSS).

Application in Genoa

The first practical implementation from Project Hafnia is a European Visual Language Model purpose-built for transportation management. This VLM is developed using transportation data sourced directly from Genoa, Italy, ensuring that only compliant and responsibly gathered data are used.

"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.

The framework developed through Project Hafnia is designed for scalability, allowing it to extend across multiple domains and accommodate future technological developments. The resulting compliant data set and the fine-tuned VLM will be made available to participating cities under a controlled access licence model, facilitating broader AI adoption across Europe whilst upholding ethical standards.

Nebius as cloud partner

Nebius will provide the cloud infrastructure underpinning Project Hafnia in Genoa, ensuring that all processing power and data handling are carried out within the jurisdiction of the EU. This guarantees adherence to European data handling regulations and digital sovereignty imperatives.

"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 centres to our deep integration with NVIDIA's AI stack, we've built a platform that meets the highest standards for performance, privacy and transparency."

Milestone's approach with Project Hafnia positions it as an early adopter within the sector of European AI development, focusing on regulatory-compliant, ethically sourced, and technologically advanced infrastructure solutions for urban environments. Through partnerships with city administrations such as Genoa and technology providers including NVIDIA and Nebius, Milestone aims to facilitate responsible deployment of AI for urban improvement initiatives across Europe.