April 11 (SeeNews) - Bulgaria attracted a combined investment of over 12 million levs ($6.7 million/6.1 million euro) from US technology giants Google, DeepMind and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the newly-launched Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology, or INSAIT, which the Bulgarian government is financing to the tune of 170 million levs over ten years, INSAIT said on Monday.
In what is seen as a breakthrough investment in a project of this kind in eastern Europe, Google and DeepMind will inject 6 million levs in INSAIT over the next three years, the institute said in a press release. AWS, meanwhile, will make available close to 7 million levs over the next five years to support INSAIT’s research on automated reasoning, the algorithmic search for proofs in mathematical logic.
Bulgarian web hosting company SiteGround will also inject 12 million levs in INSAIT, with an additional 1.7 million levs to be provided by a number of local technology entrepreneurs, including Eleven Ventures managing partner and Telerik co-founder Vassil Terziev.
INSAIT, which was formally launched on Monday by prime minister Kiril Petkov, will aim to nurture state-of-the-art advances in AI and computing through open research, with the goal of fostering a competitive high-tech economic environment in the country, according to the statement.
INSAIT was established in partnership with Swiss technology universities ETH Zurich and EPFL, with the agreement having been ratified by the Bulgarian parliament. The institute will operate as a special unit of Sofia University, and will be managed and advised by scientists from Bulgaria, the US, Israel and Switzerland.
Against the background of the launch, the Bulgarian prime minister met the representatives of Google and Amazon to discuss how co-operation in INSAIT could be extended to further projects that would boost Bulgaria's position as a digital and logistics hub in central and eastern Europe, the government's press office said in a separate statement.
Potential collaboration could involve the creation of a regional Amazon data centre in Bulgaria or a joint working group with Google to explore proposals for new projects in digital transformation, cloud computing and e-government in the country.
(1 euro = 1.95583 levs)