Milestone Pioneers AI-Driven Urban Transformation in Europe with Project Hafnia, Starting in Genoa
Following its successful launch in the USA, Milestone’s Project Hafnia has now expanded into Europe, beginning with the city of Genoa, Italy. The initiative aims to revolutionize urban infrastructure and traffic management systems by leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies. Powered by NVIDIA’s advanced tools and cloud infrastructure, this project seeks to create smarter, more efficient cities using high-quality, regulation-compliant video data. By combining real-world inputs with synthetic data generated through NVIDIA Cosmos, Milestone is building vision language models (VLMs) that promise to transform how European cities operate.
Milestone is among the first to adopt NVIDIA’s newly announced Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI, a framework designed to optimize city operations using digital twins and AI agents. This collaboration enables Milestone to enhance its data platform, generating synthetic video data from real-world scenarios to train AI models responsibly. To support this ambitious effort, European cloud provider Nebius will supply the necessary GPU compute power via NVIDIA DGX Cloud, ensuring the project adheres to strict EU data protection standards.
AI: A Catalyst for Smarter Cities
AI is unlocking new possibilities for urban environments, making them safer, more efficient, and better equipped to meet modern challenges. Through Project Hafnia, Milestone is developing AI-driven solutions that address critical urban needs, including intelligent traffic management, enhanced transportation systems, and improved safety and security for people and property.
At the heart of these innovations are vision language models (VLMs), which learn to interpret relationships between textual and visual data—such as images or videos—to generate actionable insights. By partnering with NVIDIA, Milestone is empowering cities like Genoa to build and fine-tune computer vision and AI applications on a foundation of ethically sourced, fully compliant data. The project aligns with the EU’s stringent regulatory frameworks, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the upcoming AI Act, ensuring transparency, fairness, and accountability in AI development.
Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone, emphasized the significance of this milestone: “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.”
Bridging the Gap for Ethical AI Development
One of the key challenges in AI development has been the lack of access to high-quality, ethically sourced data. Project Hafnia addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive data library that supports the fine-tuning of classical video analytics models and VLMs. These models are optimized for accuracy and performance, running efficiently on NVIDIA GPUs and integrating seamlessly with NVIDIA’s AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS).
The project’s first service offering focuses on transportation management, delivering a fully European Visual Language Model (VLM) trained on responsibly sourced and compliant transportation data from Genoa. Andrea Sinisi, Information Systems Officer for the City of Genoa, highlighted the importance of this collaboration: “AI is achieving extraordinary results, unthinkable until recently, and research in this area is constantly evolving. 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 aligns with the goals of Italy’s Three-Year Plan for Information Technology, promoting digital transformation within the Italian Public Administration.”
Scalability Across Domains and Modalities
While the initial focus of Project Hafnia is on video data, the framework is designed to scale across multiple domains and modalities. This flexibility ensures that the platform can adapt to diverse use cases, enhancing its value over time. Both the compliant dataset and the fine-tuned VLM will be made available to participating cities through a controlled access license model. This approach supports Europe’s AI ambitions while maintaining ethical standards and safeguarding sensitive public-sector data.
Nebius: Ensuring Compliance and Sovereignty
To ensure full compliance with European data protection regulations, Milestone has partnered with Nebius, an EU-based sovereign cloud provider. Nebius offers the robust infrastructure required to handle high-throughput, resilient workloads while maintaining precise control over data storage and processing. By hosting Project Hafnia’s operations in EU-based data centers and integrating deeply with NVIDIA’s AI stack, Nebius guarantees that sensitive data remains securely within EU jurisdiction.
Roman Chernin, Chief Business Officer of Nebius, expressed enthusiasm about the partnership: “Project Hafnia is exactly the kind of real-world, AI-at-scale challenge Nebius was built for. Supporting AI development today requires infrastructure engineered for high-performance workloads, with unwavering attention to privacy and transparency. From our EU-based data centers to our seamless integration with NVIDIA’s AI tools, we’ve created a platform that meets the highest standards for performance, security, and regulatory compliance.”
A Foundation for Responsible AI Innovation
Milestone’s Project Hafnia represents a significant leap forward in the development of responsible AI technologies. By combining NVIDIA’s cutting-edge tools, Nebius’s secure cloud infrastructure, and ethically sourced data, the project sets a new benchmark for urban innovation in Europe. As it expands beyond Genoa, Project Hafnia holds the potential to redefine how cities manage their infrastructure, improve quality of life for citizens, and uphold the principles of transparency and fairness in AI.
This groundbreaking initiative not only demonstrates the transformative power of AI but also underscores the importance of aligning technological advancements with ethical and regulatory standards. With its roots firmly planted in Europe, Project Hafnia is paving the way for a future where AI serves as a force for good, driving progress while respecting the values and priorities of the communities it serves.
ABOUT PROJECT HAFNIA
When training an AI model, high-quality data is essential. Just like a person learns by absorbing knowledge, AI models require vast amounts of structured data to develop reliable insights. But where does this data come from?
Enter Project Hafnia.
Project Hafnia acts as the trusted librarian of AI video data, carefully curating, tagging, and delivering ethically sourced, regulation-ready video data for AI model training. By leveraging Project Hafnia, AI learns from high-quality, verified video data, ensuring not only precision and compliance but also the protection of citizen privacy.
The vast network of end-customers, distributors and tech-partners enables Milestone to organize the world’s Video Data Eco-system with Project Hafnia and drive AI development even further.
With Project Hafnia, companies can confidently build and deploy AI models without compromising on compliance or quality.
About Milestone Systems
Milestone Systems is a world leader in data-driven video technology used in industries as diverse as manufacturing, airports, law enforcement, retail, and traffic management. We provide a clear picture of how to create a safer, better and more prosperous world. Our XProtect video management software, BriefCam AI-powered analytics, and Arcules cloud VSaaS help our customers learn from the past, understand the present, and predict the future. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Copenhagen, Milestone employs more than 1,500 people worldwide and has been an independent company in the Canon Group since2014. For more information visit: www.milestonesys.com. For news and other press releases, visit our Newsroom.
