PHAROS

The Greek AI Factory for accelerating AI innovation

PHAROS is Greece’s national AI Factory, established within the European network of AI Factories and co-funded by the European Union and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Its mission is to accelerate trustworthy AI innovation and strengthen the country’s productivity, while addressing pressing social, economic and environmental challenges through the responsible use of AI. Acting as a one-stop shop, PHAROS bridges academic research, industry needs and public policy, guiding users across the entire AI lifecycle through three layers of services — HPC/AI services and tools; procedures, workflows and functionalities; and business innovation services — powered by the pre-exascale DAEDALUS supercomputer (≥60 PFlops). It delivers ready-to-use AI services, compliant with the AI Act, GDPR and standards on fairness, transparency and security, tailored to startups and SMEs in Greece and the EU, and cultivates AI talent and skills. The Factory specialises in three key sectors — Health, Culture & Language, and Sustainability (energy, environment and climate) — and is built as a long-term, self-sustaining institution that capitalises on the country’s investments in HPC, AI and data centres and connects with related national and European initiatives.

Within PHAROS, M4D contributes to the Sustainability vertical, bringing its Earth-Observation solutions for environmental monitoring to the Factory’s portfolio. Its main contribution is a water-quality service that draws on Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery to detect and map conditions such as turbidity and muddy waters across European water bodies. The service combines an AI-ready dataset with expert-annotated masks, a deep-learning classification model, and an inference endpoint, all provided by M4D and integrated into the PHAROS platform for on-demand access. These assets also support a pilot on marine pollution and coastal water quality, to which M4D supplies satellite-based analytics for an end-to-end maritime monitoring platform.