Dec 5 (Reuters) - Italian startup iGenius and Nvidia ( NVDA )

on Thursday said they are planning to bring online one

of the world's biggest deployments of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) newest servers by

the middle of next year in a data center in southern Italy.

iGenius is building a data center that will house about 80

of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) most powerful servers, called GB200 NVL72 machines,

each with 72 of the tech company's "Blackwell" chips in them.

The startup did not give a price tag for the project. But

Chief Executive Uljan Sharka told Reuters that iGenius, one of

the few AI startups in Europe valued at more than $1 billion,

had raised 650 million euros so far this year and is taking on

additional capital for the AI computing system, which will be

called "Colosseum".

iGenius differs from rivals such as OpenAI in that it

develops open source AI software models for chatbots it sells to

banks, healthcare firms and other industries with strict data

security rules, who run the models on their own infrastructure.

For Colosseum, iGenius has also tapped into Nvidia's ( NVDA ) full

array of software tools, including one introduced this year

called Nvidia NIMS that functions almost like an app store for

AI models. That means the AI models iGenius hopes to develop

with Colosseum - some of which could be as large as 1 trillion

parameters according to one measure of AI sophistication - can

easily be distributed to any business that uses Nvidia ( NVDA ) chips.

"With a click of a button, they can now pull it from the

Nvidia ( NVDA ) catalog and implement it into their application," Sharka

said.

Colosseum will be one of the largest deployments of Nvidia's ( NVDA )

flagship servers in the world, Charlie Boyle, vice president and

general manager of DGX systems at Nvidia ( NVDA ), told Reuters.

Multiple Nvidia ( NVDA ) software and hardware teams are working

directly with iGenius to bring the system online, he said.

"They're really building something unique here."