A New AI Innovation Hub Launches in Tunisia

Today marks a significant milestone for the tech community in Tunisia as a new AI innovation hub has been inaugurated in Novation City. This technology park is specifically designed to foster an innovative ecosystem in mechatronics, an interdisciplinary field that integrates IT, mechanics, and electronics. The aim is to create synergies between education, research, and industry in this North African country.

This pioneering hub is a collaborative effort with the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI). It provides essential training, state-of-the-art technologies, and valuable business networks to accelerate the adoption of AI across the continent.

This initiative is part of NVIDIA’s ambitious plan to train 100,000 developers throughout Africa via the DLI over the next three years. Impressively, they are already about a quarter of the way to reaching this goal.

Situated in Sousse, a coastal city in central Tunisia surrounded by universities, startups, and organizations dedicated to STEM and AI, the hub offers free access to NVIDIA DLI courses. These courses cover a variety of topics such as generative AI, accelerated computing, and data science.

Novation City is not just a physical space but a comprehensive support system for AI startups and researchers. It offers cutting-edge resources, including access to the NVIDIA DGX infrastructure. Additionally, it organizes activities like hackathons and specialized training sessions to promote ecosystem growth. This new hub is an ideal environment for AI learning, experimentation, and deployment.

Anas Rochdi, the Chief Innovation Officer at Novation City, emphasized the significance of NVIDIA’s support. “Novation City has launched several key AI initiatives to strengthen the ecosystem, with NVIDIA’s support being instrumental in empowering AI startups and advancing AI skills,” Rochdi said. “This year, we deployed Tunisia’s first NVIDIA DGX system and launched major academic initiatives in collaboration with the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, aiming to train more than 1,000 developers in one year.”

Moreover, Novation City runs several startup accelerator programs, with more than ten participating companies being members of NVIDIA Inception, a free program designed to nurture cutting-edge startups.

Tunisia Drives Innovation in STEM and AI Education

Tunisia has long been recognized for its strong emphasis on STEM education, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Wei Xiao, who heads NVIDIA’s developer relations team for startups, enterprises, and universities in the Middle East and Africa, highlighted this point. “Tunisia has a rich history of valuing knowledge and scholarship, dating back to ancient Carthage and the Islamic Golden Age,” Xiao noted. “The nation’s curriculum is rigorous, creating a solid foundation for advanced studies in STEM fields.”

Strategically located as a gateway between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East (EMEA), Tunisia offers a thriving ecosystem for innovation, entrepreneurship, and research. The collaboration between Novation City and NVIDIA aims to enhance this ecosystem further through the new AI innovation hub.

The initiative brings together academia, industry, and government and is funded by French and German development agencies, the Tunisian government, the World Bank, the European Union, and several enterprises. This comes at a pivotal moment as Tunisia adopts a national strategy for AI and digitalization. This strategy includes promoting AI education and research to position the nation as a digital leader in Africa. For instance, the University of Tunis recently launched the country’s first public institute specializing in AI.

Partners Foster Sovereign AI in Tunisia and Beyond

A critical aspect of sovereign AI is a nation’s capability to develop artificial intelligence using its own workforce, infrastructure, data, and business networks. The free DLI training provided through Tunisia’s AI innovation hub aims to facilitate this, helping to upskill the next generation of African AI experts.

Novation City already offers a plethora of facilities designed to support technological and scientific advancements. In February, the technology park deployed an NVIDIA DGX system, one of the first in Africa. This has empowered around 30 startups across the continent in various sectors, including climate AI, transportation, manufacturing, and agtech, to develop solutions based on accelerated computing.

Additionally, ESPRIT University, a specialized university in Tunisia with over 10,000 engineering students, has nine NVIDIA DLI ambassadors. These ambassadors are providing training to students, thereby contributing to the broader tech ecosystem in the country. This makes ESPRIT University one of the most active DLI organizations in the EMEA region.

Since 2018, ESPRIT has been leveraging the DLI to advance AI education and has also acquired an NVIDIA DGX system to support research and product development. NVIDIA has similar AI education initiatives planned in Kenya and Nigeria, further aiming to enhance the technology ecosystems across Africa.

For more details, you can visit the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute.

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