EDIH Corsica.ai: a European initiative to accelerate digital innovation in Corsica

EDIH Corsica.ai is the European Digital Innovation Hub of Corsica.

Its mission is to support businesses and public organizations in adopting advanced digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, IoT and more broadly the building blocks necessary for digital transformation. The project is part of the European initiative for Innovation, Experimentation, and Scaling Up (IES), designed as one-stop shops to support innovation, experimentation, and scaling up. In Corsica, this ambition addresses a clear challenge: enabling local stakeholders to access the expertise, services, and infrastructure needed to develop high-value projects.

Access the corsica.ai website

EDIH Corsica.ai has been selected by the European Commission as one of the European digital hubs. The project benefits from funding from the Digital Europe program and the European Regional Development Fund (SPRING), within the framework of grant agreement no. 101083367 and ERDF agreement COR005195. The hub's offering is structured around four complementary axes:

skills development,
experimentation before investment,
support in the search for funding
and the fostering of an innovation ecosystem

A complementary consortium serving the territory

EDIH Corsica.ai is based on a consortium of actors rooted in Corsica and complementary in their professionsIt includes:


the Corsica.ai Association	AFLOKKAT	Goodbarber	FemuQuì Ventures	IS	SITEC
which contributes to the governance and coordination of some of the hub's activities	for training and skills development	for its international product and software expertise	for funding support	for the technological and academic dimension	for digital infrastructure, hosting, cloud, IoT and industrial computing

This collective approach is the project's strength. It allows us to cover a complete value chain, from skills development and ideation to prototyping, hosting, funding, and networking. In an island territory where access to technological resources can be a barrier, this integrated approach is particularly crucial.

SITEC'S ROLE IN THE PROJECT

Within the consortium, SITEC brings its historical expertise in digital infrastructure, hosting, cloud service operation, information systems, R&D and industrial computing.

The Corsica.ai consortium also presents SITEC as a key player in Corsica, with the only two interconnected data centers in the territory and recognized expertise in hosting and high value-added digital services.

In the initial phase of the project, SITEC's positioning was based on a connectivity-oriented offering, centered around a service linked to access to a submarine cable. This approach responded to a genuine territorial logic, but it proved insufficiently compatible with the project's eligibility framework and too closely aligned with an infrastructure-centric approach. The consortium therefore chose not to abandon SITEC's contribution, but to evolve it into an offering fully aligned with the operational objectives of an EDIH (Enterprise Data Infrastructure for Human Resources).

This repositioning has led to a refocusing of SITEC's contribution on an offering data hosting, cloud and cloud computing, designed for SMEs, local authorities and digital or AI project leadersThis change required redefining the offer, technical adjustments and administrative security, but it resulted in a much more robust value proposition, directly useful to beneficiaries and more consistent with the hub's mission.

A hosting and computing offer to support AI and data projects

Today, the offering from SITEC within the EDIH Corsica.ai framework aims to provide local stakeholders with concrete access to a hosting and computing infrastructure adapted to advanced digital uses. The goal is simple: to enable the development, testing, hosting, and evolution of digital applications and services without relying exclusively on external infrastructures, which are often more distant, less controlled, or less suited to certain sovereignty requirements.

This offering addresses several very concrete use cases: application hosting, provision of test environments, data processing and storage, execution of computing workloads, support for AI projects, experimentation with data models or workflows, and support for scaling up digital services. It primarily targets organizations that need a secure, controlled, and operational framework to move from idea to experimentation, and then from experimentation to deployment.

From a technical standpoint, SITEC now relies on its first operational platform dedicated to AI and high-performance computing. The infrastructure includes a server equipped with two 32-core CPUs, 512 GB of DDR5 RAM, and two 94 GB NVIDIA H100 NVL GPUs, for a total of 188 GB of GPU memory. This is complemented by 1,92 TB of local SSD storage, multi-port network connectivity, redundant power supplies, and remote administration capabilities suited to professional use. According to the technical specifications provided, this platform was designed to support advanced inference, data processing, AI prototyping, and the hosting of demanding digital services.

Why this offer is strategic for Corsica

The significance of this development goes far beyond the purely technical aspect.

In practice, many companies and public organizations encounter the same difficulties: limited access to suitable computing resources, too high a cost of entry for experimentation, lack of local hosting solutions, or the need to better control the location, security and use of data.

In this context, the offer we are making to SITEC constitutes a concrete lever for the territoryIt helps to strengthen regional digital sovereignty, secure the hosting of data and applications, reduce dependence on distant resources, and offer Corsican actors a credible environment to develop their digital and AI projects under good conditions.

This logic is fully consistent with the general ambition of EDIH Corsica.ai, which aims to increase the territory's innovation capacity and to bring about projects with a higher technological intensity.

Our current actions within the project

Following the repositioning phase, SITEC is now engaged in a process of operational deployment and ramping up operations. Current actions focus in particular on the gradual provision of hosting and cloud services, and support for project leaders requiring a controlled technical environment, the qualification of new potential beneficiaries and the structuring of a pipeline of projects to host.

The objective is twofold. Firstly, to enable local organizations to quickly access credible technical capabilities for their experiments and initial deployments. Secondly, to establish this offering on a sustainable trajectory, beyond the project itself, by fostering long-term uses around data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.

Specifically, SITEC's current offering within the EDIH Corsica.ai framework can cover:

sovereign hosting of data and applications;
the provision of cloud environments for digital projects;
support for AI and data experimentation;
hosting specialized computing loads;
technical support for the progressive industrialization of innovative services.

For SITEC, this participation is part of a clear strategy: to provide useful, concrete, and independent hosting and computing capacity to support local projects. The repositioning undertaken within the project has transformed an initial, inadequate concept into a more robust, usable offering that is now better aligned with the real needs of businesses and public sector stakeholders.

Project funded by the European Union under the Digital Europe programme and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Grant agreement no. 101083367 – ERDF agreement: COR005195.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the managing authorities. Neither the European Union nor the managing authorities can be held liable for them.