Tirana Times, February 10, 2026 – Serbia and North Macedonia have secured concrete European Union funding to integrate into Europe’s emerging artificial intelligence infrastructure, while Albania—despite high-profile political messaging around AI—has been left outside the first wave of financed projects.
According to the latest map and project list published by the European Commission, Serbia and North Macedonia are among the beneficiaries of the EU’s new network of AI Factory Antennas, which serve as national gateways into Europe’s AI and supercomputing ecosystem. Albania does not appear among the funded countries at this stage, even though it formally joined the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking in June 2025.
Serbia has been awarded approximately €3.8 million in EU funding for the SAIFA project, a national Artificial Intelligence Factory Antenna designed to provide public institutions, universities, start-ups, and industry with access to high-performance computing resources, AI development tools, datasets, and technical expertise. The project is set to function as part of the wider European AI Factory network and will be connected to major AI hubs in Greece and Italy, enabling Serbian developers and researchers to test and scale AI solutions at a European level.
North Macedonia, meanwhile, has launched the “Vezilka” project, its national AI center, with a total budget of around €6 million. The project is co-financed by the EU through Horizon Europe and EuroHPC, alongside national funding and local partners. It aims to connect universities, public institutions, and industry with the European AI ecosystem, offering access to supercomputers and shared European datasets via regional AI Factories.
In both cases, the projects are intended to open advanced computing power to start-ups, SMEs, and scientific research communities, resources that would otherwise remain accessible only to large global technology companies.
Albania’s absence from this first funding round is politically and symbolically significant. In recent months, the government sought international attention by branding itself as a global outlier through the appointment of a so-called artificial intelligence minister, publicly personified under the name “Diella.” This move succeeded in attracting coverage from international media outlets and framing Albania as an early adopter in the AI governance debate.
However, the reality behind this carefully constructed image has since unraveled. Rather than signaling institutional readiness or strategic capacity in artificial intelligence, the “Diella” narrative increasingly appears to have functioned as a façade. Once this façade cracked, it revealed deeper structural problems within the state’s digital governance framework. Investigations and reporting have shown that behind the public AI branding stood a deeply compromised institutional environment, including allegations that the National Agency for Information Society, AKSHI, was effectively captured and controlled by a structured criminal group.
This contrast between image and substance helps explain Albania’s failure to translate political messaging into concrete participation in the EU’s AI infrastructure programs. Membership in EuroHPC provides formal access to Europe’s supercomputing framework, but it does not automatically unlock funding. Participation in AI Factories and Antennas requires credible project design, national co-financing, institutional integrity, and technical governance capacity—areas where Albania has demonstrably fallen short.
At the European level, AI Factories and Antennas are part of a broader strategic push to build an AI ecosystem based on infrastructure rather than symbolism. Between 2021 and 2027, EU investments in supercomputing and AI infrastructure are expected to reach around €10 billion through EuroHPC and related programs. Beyond this, the InvestAI initiative aims to mobilize up to €200 billion in public and private AI investment, including massive AI “gigafactories” designed to secure Europe’s competitiveness against the United States and China.
Against this backdrop, Albania’s exclusion is more than a missed opportunity. It highlights a growing gap between political spectacle and policy execution, and between international messaging and domestic governance realities. As neighboring countries anchor themselves within Europe’s AI backbone, Albania risks being relegated to the margins of the continent’s digital transformation unless it replaces façade-building with credible institutions, transparency, and strategic capacity.
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