Artificial intelligence, Fastweb supercomputer to go live in July

An artificial intelligence model made in Fastweb, built in-house, with the utmost attention to the central issues of data and copyright. "We are the only ones who want to say in all transparency how we are training our models. To date we already have 1,500 billion tokens of valid content: all in Italian and the result of agreements. We have an agreement with Bignami Edizioni, which is a small but high-quality publisher. We have Official Journals, which are public documents. We have used the Common Crawl, which means web data cleaned up by ourselves. These are also copyright proof. And we have all the data related to our digital school, the Fastweb Digital Academy, which has produced a lot of quality content over the years'.

Fastweb CEO Walter Renna goes back to the numbers to capture the hallmark of the work the Swisscom-controlled telephone company is doing on the Ai front. To speak of 1.5 trillion tokens is to say "11 million books" of content for which copyright has been paid and which can be used in artificial intelligence solutions. It is on these that Fastweb has decided to bet with determination. "I would like to point out two figures. Firstly,' Renna emphasises, 'the artificial intelligence market in Italy, which was worth half a billion in 2023, will be worth around 2 billion in five years' time. The second point is that our Ai strategy is part of our ecosystem of solutions. Artificial intelligence needs cloud, cybersecurity and high-performance connectivity to work. So it is a proposition that ties in with all our services and then goes into a market, the business market, that is growing, especially on these additional services that are there and that are somehow developed on top of the telecommunications layer'.

The project - which Renna spoke about on Sunday 26 May 2024 at the Trento Festival of Economics as part of the 'Supercomputers that are changing our lives' panel at Palazzo Geremia - is now entering its operational phase.

The supercomputer that Fastweb purchased at the end of last year from Nvidia 'will be inaugurated at the beginning of July and will be installed in a data centre in Lombardy' and 'connected with our national data centres. We have four state-of-the-art national data centres. Why is this important? Because this provides resilience to the solution and of course it will be protected by all our cybersecurity facilities and will be connected to our super high-performance network'.

From a practical and operational point of view, this will mean that 'we will finally be able to start developing and commercialising artificial intelligence solutions. We will finally be able to start working with companies and public administrations to develop vertical applications'. A line of activity that, as mentioned, aims to support a telco world that is paying the price for the crisis in traditional business and is increasingly showing the strain. "The Tlc market is worth about 18 billion in Italy. Above that there are 80 billion services ranging from cloud, to It, to entertainment. To grow, and to take a share of the market outside of telecommunications, is a great opportunity that must be seized'.