An Archipelago of Ateliers: How European AI Factories Can Power the New European Bauhaus

Europe's AI factories are not merely computing infrastructure — they are the new ateliers. Like the original Bauhaus workshops, they are spaces where craft, creativity, and technology converge to prototype new ways of making and living. Yet today these resources remain largely out of reach for the artistic, design, and sustainability communities that are building the NEB movement.

This session argues that opening Europe's sovereign AI and High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure to the NEB community is the missing piece that can take NEB ambitions from inspiring pilot projects to continental-scale transformation. The AI Continent Action Plan and the EU Tech Sovereignty agenda have created a historic opportunity: to build public-interest AI infrastructure that is not only powerful and open, but also embedded in Europe's cultural and creative intelligence.

Through a coalition of leading European HPC centres and artists working at the frontier of computation and ecological imagination, the session presents the vision of an Archipelago of Ateliers — a distributed network of creative-computational laboratories powering circular design, new materials, environmental modelling, and democratic tools for the next chapter of the NEB.

Speakers:

• Francesca Bria - Co-director, Archipelago of Possible Futures (IT)
• José Luis de Vicente - Co-director, Archipelago of Possible Futures (ES)
• Tommaso Calarco - Director of the Institute for Quantum Control at Forschungszentrum Jülich (IT)
• Cristian Canton - Associate Director, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS) (ES)
• Gabriella Scipione - Director HPC at CINECA (IT)
• Christian Rauch (Moderator) - Director, Berlin Science Week (DE)
• Fabien Giraud - Artist and researcher, Feral project (FR)
• Ralph Dum - High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (DE)