Here comes IS-IA – Italy’s Sovereign Intelligence Architecture, Engineering’s answer for a sovereign, secure, and sustainable AI.
The company active in digitizing processes for businesses and public administrations, led by Aldo Bisio (pictured), has presented IS-IA – Italy’s Sovereign Intelligence Architecture, an architectural approach based on the concept of Italian Artificial Intelligence, governable and secure.
Built on EngGPT 2, the Group’s Italian foundation model, IS-IA allows companies and public administrations to govern data, models, and infrastructures, transforming Artificial Intelligence from a commodity into strategic capital.
“The pervasive adoption of GenAI is an urgent step for the country’s competitiveness,” commented Aldo Bisio, CEO of Engineering, adding that “It must, however, be fully governable to avoid the ‘expropriation’ of distinctive skills and know-how of our companies and institutions. We have developed a ‘sovereign’ architecture (in the sense of governable and inspectable), which allows maintaining full control over data, models, and infrastructures, to preserve the cognitive heritage and solutions of companies and institutions.”
All the details.
WHAT IS IS-IA
IS-IA is the end-to-end architecture that Engineering offers to companies and public administrations to govern the entire AI lifecycle: from infrastructure to data, from the foundation model to specialization, up to orchestration in business processes and governance.
BASED ON THE ITALIAN ENGGPT2 MODEL
As already mentioned, IS-IA is built on EngGPT 2, an Italian platform of Private Generative AI that is controlled, efficient, secure, transparent, highly customizable to organizational needs, fully compliant with the AI Act standards, and capable of delivering performance comparable to the best international open models in its class.
So, if EngGPT 2 is the sovereign foundation model that constitutes its core, IS-IA is what allows transforming it into cumulative value over time, through a growing library of reusable and certified specialized models, the group’s statement indicates, highlighting that here lies “the difference between ‘using AI’ and ‘owning your own intelligence.’”
THE FEATURES OF ENGGPT 2
Therefore, EngGPT 2 is a sovereign AI platform, an Italian LLM, characterized by 16 billion parameters and trained from scratch with 2.5 trillion tokens (word/piece of word): it is as if the platform could study about 30 million books. Furthermore, of these trillions of tokens, about 25% consists of “data” in the Italian language to improve the model’s accuracy in capturing linguistic subtleties and the different economic-social, industrial, and regulatory contexts of Italy.
Moreover, EngGPT 2 also leverages the work of the 130 Italian researchers of the Group’s Competence Center R&I, who in 2025 alone were engaged in over 50 projects on AI and Data technologies.
FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY
Among EngGPT 2’s distinctive properties are efficiency and sustainability.
Thanks to the advanced Mixture of Experts architecture, the model can activate only the necessary components for each request. This means that EngGPT 2 can use up to one fifth of the energy required by equivalent models, resulting in a lower environmental impact, also due to the reduced water consumption needed for cooling data centers.
Also in the area of energy saving, EngGPT 2 clients will use the platform through the Group’s 3 data centers (located in Pont-Saint-Martin, Turin, and Vicenza) powered 100% by renewable energy. The Pont-Saint-Martin facility, in the Aosta Valley, is equipped with a geothermal cooling system that also uses groundwater to naturally cool the systems, with a closed-loop system that avoids waste while preserving the area’s water balance.
EngGPT’s efficiency also translates into: training up to 10 times more efficient compared to so-called dense models of comparable size (AI models that activate all parameters for every single user request); a 50% – 80% reduction in inference costs compared to dense models of comparable size, meaning the ability to generate responses following new inputs. Additionally, designed according to strict security by design principles, EngGPT 2 guarantees complete traceability and auditability.
COMPLIANT WITH THE AI ACT
Furthermore, the platform is “verifiable” and compliant with the AI Act because it allows seeing which data it uses, how it was trained, with which techniques, and with what limits.
AN OPEN PLATFORM
The company also highlights the open approach, meaning making the model understandable and verifiable: everything is transparent – weights, list of data used, training, and results. Datasets, pipelines, techniques, metrics, and related limitations are available within a specific “technical report” also made public, ensuring maximum transparency and full verifiability of the training process.
EngGPT 2 has an architecture easily interoperable with other platforms.
This enables agentic solutions, allowing the combination of proprietary models and market models, while protecting intellectual property (IP), enhancing distinctive know-how, and adopting specialized and customizable AI solutions.
THE GROUP’S STRATEGY
In this way, the company aims to support “organizations to no longer rely solely on AI that is difficult to govern, inspect, and certify.” Rather, “Artificial Intelligence thus becomes an asset that generates cumulative value over time and contributes to building a defensible and lasting competitive advantage,” emphasizes Engineering’s statement.
THE CEO’S WORDS
“With IS-IA, our Italy’s Sovereign Intelligence Architecture built on the EngGPT 2 foundation model, we bring to market a GenAI architecture developed in Italy: efficient, open, compliant with the AI Act, capable of integrating into hybrid environments and adapting to the most regulated contexts,” concluded Engineering CEO Bisio, stressing that “It is not just about adopting AI: it is about building and governing it as a strategic asset for the country. IS-IA and EngGPT 2 are a concrete enabler of this vision and an opportunity to strengthen technological autonomy, innovation, and growth of the national system.”
