VEZILKA – North Macedonia’s national AI Factory Antenna

VEZILKA is North Macedonia’s national AI Factory Antenna — a capital project for the country’s digital transformation, established under the European Union’s EuroHPC AI Factory Antennas initiative. It connects domestic universities, start-ups, companies and institutions to the European Union’s supercomputers and digital resources, giving North Macedonia a strategic position within the European innovation network at a stage when AI adoption across the country’s industry, public sector and society remains limited.

The project is hosted by the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje (UKIM) and implemented by the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering (FCSE), with the Ministry of Digital Transformation as principal institutional partner. Its mission is to accelerate the adoption of trustworthy, ethical and responsible AI through concrete, applicable solutions with high social and economic impact.

VEZILKA applies a “Trustworthy AI by design” approach built on rigorous data governance, fairness and bias mitigation, transparent and explainable AI, and human-in-the-loop decision-making. The project addresses the societal and workforce implications of AI adoption through a large-scale upskilling and reskilling effort and a broad public AI-literacy programme, extending its benefits beyond the technical community to the wider public.

As a national antenna rather than a single research initiative, VEZILKA’s activities reach across universities, start-ups, SMEs and public institutions. By lowering the cost of access to advanced AI infrastructure and pairing it with training and governance safeguards, the project is designed to convert investment in a single point of national infrastructure into a broad-based shift in the country’s AI capability — a bridge between North Macedonia’s research community, its industry, and its public sector.

Vezilka means “the embroiderer.” Embroidery is the art of connection: every thread, with its own direction and color, becomes part of a larger, harmonious picture — the same principle by which an AI model is built from a great many individual pieces of data. VEZILKA symbolizes the connection of people and knowledge, the creation of something meaningful from individual parts, and the carrying of tradition into the future — a bridge between past and future, tradition and technology, culture and intelligence, and a symbol of a new digital renaissance in North Macedonia.

At a glance

For more information about VEZILKA, please visit the following Link.