The European AI Factory initiative aims to distribute sovereign compute capacity across Europe, but participation from Western Balkans accession countries has remained largely aspirational. Albania is charting a different course.
Albania's ICT sector employs tens of thousands of skilled engineers, but almost entirely in software outsourcing—writing code for other countries' products on other countries' architectures. This model creates employment but not ownership, capability but not sovereignty. The age of AI demands transformation: from consuming compute to shaping it.
This talk presents a strategy to establish one of Europe's first RISC-V-native AI compute facilities. The initiative is designed not only to serve Albania's public-sector AI needs but to act as a regional compute hub for the Western Balkans and a gateway for Middle Eastern partners seeking EU-aligned AI infrastructure.
Critically, the strategy begins in the classroom. By embedding RISC-V into Albanian computer science and engineering education, the initiative connects that talent pipeline directly to a sovereign AI compute facility, transforming a generation of outsourcing engineers into architects of AI infrastructure.
Kushtrim Shala draws on Albania's track record in digital innovation to show how small, agile countries can move faster than larger member states in adopting open ISA infrastructure. The talk addresses what it takes to bootstrap a semiconductor culture and makes the case that RISC-V is not merely a technical choice but a strategic instrument of digital sovereignty—one that smaller nations can leverage to build resilient, independent AI capacity.