Lithuania invests 7.5 million euros in AI adoption amid infrastructure shortages

Lithuania is increasing support for artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the private sector. The Ministry of Economy and Innovation has updated its ‘AI solutions implementation’ call, allocating up to 7.5 million euros to help micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises digitize and optimize production processes. The funding is distributed geographically, with up to 2.5 million euros designated for the Vilnius region and up to 5 million euros for central and western Lithuanian regions. To ensure effectiveness, payments are made upon the achievement of final results and positive expert evaluations.

Parallel to these funding efforts, industry experts highlight significant challenges in the AI landscape. Rėdas Šimelis, head of 3RTechnology, noted a massive surge in demand for AI infrastructure, leading to wait times of up to 36 weeks for orders. This scarcity has also driven up costs, with some hardware prices doubling in recent months. While public cloud services are an option for some, stricter data protection requirements often necessitate local or European physical infrastructure, forcing companies to join global queues for hardware like GPU accelerators. In response to these needs, Vilnius University has utilized specialized procurement to establish a 0.5 million euro data center dedicated to machine learning and quantum computing for natural and biomedical research.