The Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, AIRi@UTCN, will be inaugurated on November 18. The announcement was made by Adria Groza, vice-rector for IT infrastructure and digitalization at UTCN, during a panel at the Transilvania Digital Innovation Summit, held Thursday in Cluj.

The building, erected on Observatorului Street in the UTCN campus, has approximately 14,000 square meters and will include 33 laboratories. The updated value of the construction is approximately 141.8 million lei. The initial completion deadline of November 2025 was postponed to March 2026 and then exceeded, with work completed in two years, according to Groza.

The Institute is already starting with human resources from the university: of UTCN's 800 doctoral students, 400 work in the field of artificial intelligence, and Groza specified that approximately 200 of these are considered good and another 200 very good. AIRi has already initiated joint laboratories with companies from telecom, semiconductors and microelectronics, and the automotive sector, planning to collaborate more intensively with small and medium-sized enterprises through co-working spaces, access to specialists, or research contracts with established budgets and deadlines.

The University recently signed a financing contract for the AI4INO project, intended to equip the institute with computing infrastructure, equipment and specialized software, with a total value of 61.19 million lei, of which the maximum non-reimbursable financing is 58.38 million lei.

For a Cluj native who has moved abroad, the opening of the institute means the emergence in Cluj of a university research center dedicated to artificial intelligence, with joint laboratories and projects alongside companies from the industry.