en.Wedoany.com Reported - Italy's supercomputing institution Cineca has signed a four-year framework agreement with a temporary consortium led by DBA Group to further strengthen its critical infrastructure. The consortium includes Maestrale and its partners Ariatta, Redesco, and Starching, covering services in engineering, construction, and technical consultancy, with a focus on supporting upgrades to high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing-related infrastructure.
This agreement addresses the needs of Cineca's next phase of supercomputing capacity development. As computational loads from high-performance computing, AI model training, and quantum computing applications continue to grow, data centers must achieve greater resilience, energy efficiency, and scalability. By engaging a specialized engineering consortium, Cineca's core objective is to enhance its capabilities in the design, construction, renovation, and long-term operational support of critical infrastructure.
The scope of the agreement includes high-voltage electrical connection engineering, new construction and renovation of HPC data centers, upgrades to existing facilities, major maintenance, building renovations, and new construction projects for Cineca's own infrastructure. For a supercomputing center, power access, cooling systems, building load capacity, network connectivity, and operational continuity directly determine whether the computing platform can stably support scientific research, industrial simulation, and AI applications.
Cineca is one of Europe's major supercomputing centers, tasked with providing high-performance computing services for Italian scientific research, universities, public institutions, and industrial innovation. Its data center at the Bologna Tecnopolo already hosts the Leonardo supercomputing system and is advancing infrastructure evolution around the European AI Factory and quantum computing capabilities. This framework agreement will provide more systematic engineering support for these new computing workloads.
DBA Group will play a coordinating role within the consortium. The company has long provided services in architecture, engineering, project management, and digital technology. Maestrale, along with Ariatta, Redesco, and Starching, will contribute specialized expertise in data centers, structural engineering, electromechanical systems, and technical design. This multi-party collaboration model is suitable for complex projects like supercomputing infrastructure, as no single engineering capability can cover all requirements including power, construction, cooling, automation, BIM, and sustainability.
From a technical perspective, HPC and AI data centers are no longer just about building server room space. Next-generation GPU clusters, AI training systems, hybrid quantum-classical computing platforms, and scientific big data applications will continue to drive up power density, cooling demands, and reliability requirements. If infrastructure cannot be upgraded synchronously, it will limit the expansion of supercomputing systems and the deployment of new scientific computing tasks.
This collaboration is also relevant to the competitive landscape of European supercomputing. Europe is advancing the construction of AI Factory, EuroHPC, and quantum computing infrastructure, aiming to provide higher levels of computing resources to research institutions, enterprises, and the public sector. By strengthening its data center and engineering support capabilities through a long-term framework agreement, Cineca helps enhance Italy's infrastructure capacity within the European AI and supercomputing ecosystem.
The project's subsequent focus will be on the issuance of specific engineering tasks, the pace of data center upgrades, power and cooling system renovations, the application of digital design methods such as BIM, and the coordinated deployment of HPC, AI, and quantum computing platforms. As the four-year framework agreement is executed, Cineca's critical infrastructure will be progressively upgraded to support higher computing density, greater energy efficiency, and more complex computational tasks.
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