Milestone has extended its AI-powered smart city platform, Project Hafnia, to Europe following its initial rollout in the United States. In collaboration with the city of Genoa, Italy, the project aims to enhance urban infrastructure and traffic management using advanced video data models and artificial intelligence technologies developed with NVIDIA.
AI and synthetic data powering smart city development
Project Hafnia uses high-quality video data, both real and synthetic, to train Vision Language Models (VLMs) for city-scale applications. These VLMs are built using NVIDIA NeMo Curator on NVIDIA DGX Cloud and are designed to understand and summarise visual inputs, such as images and videos, in context. The models help cities manage traffic, improve public safety, and optimise infrastructure planning with greater precision.
Milestone is among the first to adopt the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI, a framework designed to improve city operations using digital twins and AI agents. The company is also integrating NVIDIA Cosmos to generate synthetic video data for more diverse training sets.
To train these models, Milestone is partnering with Nebius, a European cloud provider that offers GPU computing power while ensuring full compliance with the EU’s strict data privacy and AI regulations, including GDPR and the AI Act. This approach ensures data transparency, fairness, and regulatory alignment.
“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,” said Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone.
First model trained on transportation data from Genoa
As part of its European expansion, Milestone has introduced its first service offering under Project Hafnia: a Visual Language Model trained on transportation data from Genoa. This model supports smarter traffic management and planning, with all data responsibly sourced and fully compliant with EU 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,” said Andrea Sinisi, Information Systems Officer for the City of Genoa.
Both the transportation dataset and the fine-tuned VLM will be made available to participating cities through a controlled access licence model, allowing wider adoption while upholding ethical standards and data protection laws.
Nebius provides cloud infrastructure for compliant AI training
Project Hafnia’s European operations are supported by Nebius, which serves as the sovereign cloud provider for the platform’s data and model training infrastructure. Based in the EU, Nebius ensures that all sensitive data remains within European jurisdiction and complies with local data protection requirements.
“Project Hafnia is exactly the kind of real-world, AI-at-scale challenge Nebius was built for,” said 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 centres to our deep integration with NVIDIA’s AI stack, we’ve built a platform that meets the highest standards for performance, privacy and transparency.”
Milestone’s work with Project Hafnia represents a significant step in developing ethical, compliant AI for smart cities in Europe. By combining regulatory alignment with advanced technology, the initiative sets a precedent for scalable and responsible urban innovation.
