Milestone launches Project Hafnia for AI-driven city management

Milestone has commenced its Project Hafnia to develop AI-driven solutions for urban infrastructure and traffic management, with the first city being Genoa in Italy.

The initiative is aimed at improving city operations by harnessing computer vision technologies, using high-quality video data that adheres to European regulatory frameworks, including GDPR and the AI Act. Video data used for the project is trained with NVIDIA's NeMo Curator on NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

Collaboration and compliance

Milestone is among the first companies to utilise the new NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI—a framework designed for optimising city operations through digital twins and AI agents. The company is also enhancing its data platform by generating synthetic video data via NVIDIA Cosmos, which processes real-world inputs. This combination of real and synthetic video data is used to build and train Vision Language Models (VLMs) in a manner that the company states is responsible and regulation-compliant.

European cloud provider Nebius will supply the GPU compute for training these models, which is an element in keeping data processing anchored within European borders and compliant with regional data protection regulations.

The application of AI within Project Hafnia spans smart traffic and transportation management, as well as improvements in safety and security for cities. VLMs establish connections between textual data and visual information from images or videos, enabling AI models to generate insights and summaries from visual sources. These efforts, the company asserts, are based upon regulatory integrity, data diversity, and relevance to European legal frameworks.

"I'm proud that 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," says Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone.

Genoa as a first

Project Hafnia's first European service offering consists of a Visual Language Model specifically for transportation management, drawing on transportation data sourced from Genoa. The model is powered by NVIDIA technology and has been trained on data that is both responsibly sourced and compliant with applicable regulations.

"AI is achieving extraordinary results, unthinkable until recently, and the research in the area is in constant development. 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 is a key principle in the Three-Year Plan for Information Technology, aiming to promote digital transformation in Italy and particularly within the Italian Public Administration," says Andrea Sinisi, Information Systems Officer, City of Genoa.

The structure of Project Hafnia's collaborations allows for scalability, as the framework is designed to operate across multiple domains and data types. The compliant datasets and the fine-tuned VLMs will be supplied to participating cities via a controlled access licence model, supporting the region's AI ambitions within ethical standards.

Role of Nebius

Nebius has been selected as Project Hafnia's European cloud provider. The company operates EU-based data centres, facilitating digital sovereignty objectives and ensuring that sensitive public sector data remains within the jurisdiction of European data protection laws.

"Project Hafnia is exactly the kind of real-world, AI-at-scale challenge Nebius was built for," says Roman Chernin, Chief Business Officer of Nebius."Supporting AI development today requires infrastructure engineered for high-throughput, high-resilience workloads, with precise control over where data lives and how it's handled. From our EU-based data centers to our deep integration with NVIDIA's AI stack, we've built a platform that meets the highest standards for performance, privacy and transparency."

Project Hafnia data platform

Project Hafnia acts as what Milestone refers to as a 'trusted librarian' of AI-ready video data, with the platform curating, tagging, and delivering video data that is described as ethically sourced and regulation-ready for AI model training. The emphasis is placed on maintaining precision, compliance, and citizen privacy throughout the process.

According to Milestone, its network of customers, distributors, and technology partners enables the company to organise a comprehensive video data ecosystem that advances the development of AI in video analytics. Project Hafnia is positioned as a resource that companies can use to build AI models while meeting compliance and quality standards.

The project will make both the compliant dataset and the fine-tuned Visual Language Model available to participating cities on a controlled basis as part of its effort to support AI development across Europe.