There are plenty of places where you would expect to find an AI computing facility. One hundred metres beneath an active mine in the Italian Alps probably is not one of them.
Yet that is exactly where you will find Intacture, in Val di Non, Trentino. And that is part of what makes the project interesting. Not only the technology itself, but where it has been built. Innovation in Trentino is not confined to university campuses or technology districts in the province’s main cities. It can also take shape in its valleys, smaller towns and mountain communities. Intacture makes that idea unusually tangible.
A data centre inside a working mine
Intacture is the first European data centre built inside an operating mine. It was officially inaugurated in June 2026 and is now operational inside the Tassullo dolomite mine in Predaia, Val di Non
, at a depth of around 100 metres.
The facility combines secure data infrastructure with a high-performance computing platform designed for artificial intelligence applications. And putting it inside a mountain is more than an architectural curiosity. The surrounding rock remains naturally stable at around 12°C, allowing the facility to use natural free cooling for roughly 75% of the year. The infrastructure uses no water for cooling, operates on electricity from renewable sources, predominantly local hydropower, and is designed to offer a high level of physical protection and operational continuity.
In this case, the mountain is part of the technology.
Built in Trentino, designed for advanced computing
Intacture was developed by Trentino DataMine, a public-private partnership bringing together the University of Trento and four Trentino-based companies. The University holds 49% of the company and provides scientific direction. The remaining 51% is held by Covi Costruzioni, Dedagroup, GPI Group and ISA – Istituto Atesino di Sviluppo. Together they bring expertise spanning underground construction, digital infrastructure, healthcare technology and investment.
The project represents an overall investment of more than €50 million, including €18.4 million in funding from Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan. At its core is a supercomputing platform designed for advanced AI applications in fields including scientific research, digital healthcare, industry, cybersecurity and logistics. The cluster can reach approximately 200 petaflops of AI inference performance, while storage capacity can scale to 10 petabytes.
Those are serious computing capabilities in a place that, seen on a map, looks like an Alpine valley far from Europe's major technology centres. That contrast is precisely the point.
Innovation does not stop at the city limits
For someone looking at Trentino from outside Italy, Val di Non might first register as mountains, orchards and small communities. It is all of those things. But now it is also home to advanced computing infrastructure.
Elsewhere in the province, life sciences research is taking place in Pergine Valsugana, mechatronics and industrial innovation have developed in Rovereto, and research centres and the University of Trento connect local companies with international scientific networks.
The geography is distributed, and so is the innovation.
That matters in a mountain territory. It means a valley does not automatically have to be treated as somewhere peripheral to economic and technological development. Intacture is an extreme example, but a memorable one.
A different picture of the Italian Alps
When people outside Italy think about the Alps, technology infrastructure is probably not the first image that comes to mind.
Trentino offers a more complicated picture. This is a place where mountain communities remain part of the economic and social fabric, where public and private investment reaches beyond the main cities, and where an active mine can become the home of a high-performance computing platform.
Here, being in the mountains does not necessarily mean being far from innovation. Sometimes innovation is literally inside the mountain.
