Slovenia Halts €10M-a-Year National Generative AI Platform

By Suad Seferi · Aug 19, 2026

Slovenia has stopped a planned national platform that would have given citizens, businesses, public-sector employees and researchers access to advanced generative AI tools, redirecting the project's €10 million annual budget as the education and science ministry tries to close a major funding gap. Education, Science and Youth Minister Borut Rončević signed the decision to halt the public procurement on August 18. The tender, formally titled Access and Configuration of Access to a Platform with Top Language Models, had been launched in November 2025. The ministry said the money earmarked for the platform will instead be used to reduce a budget shortfall. In July, officials estimated that the ministry could be around €133 million short of the funds it needs by the end of the year. Rončević said the ministry was being forced to prioritise its legal obligations and the stable operation of the education, higher education, science and research systems. The decision puts on hold one of Slovenia's more unusual experiments in public access to generative AI. When the project was announced last year, then-prime minister Robert Golob said the intention was to provide broad access to AI tools through a national portal. The service was expected to be available not only to individual citizens but also to employees in companies and the public sector, as well as researchers. Slovenia hoped to become one of the first countries to offer such a platform nationally. The cancellation does not mean Slovenia is abandoning its broader AI programme. In March, the government adopted its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy to 2030, which puts AI infrastructure, domestic capabilities, public-sector adoption and technological sovereignty at the centre of the country's plans. The strategy specifically includes a national AI platform among the capabilities Slovenia wants to develop. Slovenia is also building an AI Factory as part of the European EuroHPC initiative. The Slovenian AI Factory project has a total value of €135 million and is intended to expand access to high-performance computing, AI infrastructure and expertise for researchers, companies and other organisations. That makes the decision more complicated than a simple retreat from artificial intelligence. The cancelled procurement focused on giving users access to advanced language models. Slovenia's wider strategy, by contrast, also calls for computing infrastructure, sovereign cloud services, Slovenian-language technologies, open standards and domestic research capacity. The distinction matters for smaller European countries trying to decide how public money should be spent on AI. Governments can subsidise access to commercial tools, invest in shared computing infrastructure, support domestic models and research, or combine those approaches. Each carries different costs and questions over technological dependence. Those questions were already part of the debate around the Slovenian project. Local reporting says a group of experts and civil society organisations had challenged the original procurement, raising concerns about digital sovereignty, public spending, copyright and the environmental impact of large AI systems. They argued that public investment should favour open and domestically developed technologies instead. The ministry, however, has presented the current cancellation primarily as a financial decision. Rončević said stopping the procurement should not be interpreted as moving away from the development and use of AI in Slovenia's education and research sectors. The ministry says further AI activities will be considered according to available funding and the needs of the system. For Slovenia, the immediate question is therefore not whether it will continue investing in artificial intelligence. Its national strategy and AI Factory suggest that it will. What is now uncertain is whether the idea of publicly funded, nationwide access to leading generative AI models will return in another form, and whether it will survive the much less experimental pressures of the national budget.