From HPC to AI Factories: ELIXIR Brings Big Health and Omics Data to Scale at PMNET Forum 2026

On 8–9 October 2026, the 5th PMNET Forum, an international not-for-profit event dedicated to precision medicine, took place at the National Library of Latvia in Riga. The forum was organised by Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) in collaboration with Latvia’s children’s health foundations, the Children’s Clinical University Hospital, the Ministry of Economics, and the Ministry of Health.

On 8–9 October 2026, the 5th PMNET Forum, an international not-for-profit event dedicated to precision medicine, took place at the National Library of Latvia in Riga. The forum was organised by Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) in collaboration with Latvia’s children’s health foundations, the Children’s Clinical University Hospital, the Ministry of Economics, and the Ministry of Health.

Each day opened with a plenary keynote session addressing senior policymakers, including Latvia's Minister of Health and Minister for Education and Science, before splitting into parallel scientific, stakeholder and paediatric-precision-medicine tracks covering topics from cancer genetics, rare diseases and biobanking to CAR-T cell therapies, translational medicine and health-innovation funding. The two days brought together clinicians, researchers, industry and policymakers from across the Baltic and Nordic region and beyond.

On the second day, 9 October, a dedicated stakeholder session turned to the infrastructure behind modern biomedical research: "Big Health & Omics Data at Scale: ELIXIR, HPC and AI Factories," chaired by Dr. rer. nat. Baiba Vilne of Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU), as part of RSU's participation in the Horizon Europe programme (Project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014).

The 90-minute session brought three speakers from Finland, Estonia and Latvia to the same stage, each presenting national and European high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure for the life sciences, before closing with a panel discussion among all three.

The first speaker, Juha Törnroos, Director of CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd and an Executive Committee member of the European Life Sciences Infrastructure for Biological Information Consortium (ELIXIR) Compute Platform, opened with "From ELIXIR Compute to AI Factories: Federated Cloud and HPC Services for Life Science Research." He traced the development of federated genomic-data infrastructure in Europe, from the European Genome-Phenome Archive's 2008 founding and its federation from 2016, through the 2018 1+ Million Genomes declaration, to the first Federated European Genome-Phenome Archive (FEGA) nodes going live in 2022. He described how Finland's 2019 Secondary Use Act and its Kapseli secure processing environment anticipated several concepts later built into the EU's European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation, in force since 2025, and outlined how ELIXIR's Compute Platform uses Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) standards to federate computation across borders. He closed by placing ELIXIR within the EU's AI Factories initiative, launched through the European Commission's AI Innovation Package in January 2024, as the designated life-science research use case.

The second talk, "Estonia's HPC and Trusted Research Environment Ecosystem: From SAPU to AI-Ready Research Infrastructure," was presented jointly by Aadi Tegova and Arnold Leonhard Mertsin of the High Performance Computing Centre at the University of Tartu's Institute of Computer Science. They described the Centre's growth from a 1959 university computing unit into an ISO/IEC 27001:2022-certified national infrastructure provider, leading the Estonian Scientific Computing Infrastructure consortium (ETAIS) together with TalTech and KBFI. Central to their talk was SAPU, Estonia's Sensitive Data Analysis Platform — a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) built to the SATRE specification, giving external researchers fully auditable access to sensitive data such as the Estonian Biobank's records for more than 200,000 people, around a fifth of the country's adult population. They placed this work alongside Estonia's status as a founding ELIXIR Node since 2013 and its role in the Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project, and linked it to Estonia's participation in LUMI, Europe's flagship EuroHPC supercomputer, and the associated LUMI AI Factory.

The final speaker, Vita Zeidenberga, Director of the AI and Computing Centre (AICC) at the University of Latvia, presented "From University HPC to AI Factory Antennas: Building Latvia's Research Computing Capacity." She set out AICC's 2026 hardware expansion — including new GPU nodes and a MikroTik-donated AI accelerator — built on the combined computing base of the University of Latvia and Riga Technical University (RTU). The centrepiece of her talk was the AI Factory Antenna – Latvia project: an RTU-coordinated consortium, including the University of Latvia, the State Digital Development Agency and other national partners, running from July 2026 to June 2029 with European Commission funding of around €7.73 million and a direct connection to Finland's LUMI AI Factory. She also outlined Latvia's regulatory sandbox for artificial intelligence, run by the National Artificial Intelligence Centre, as a route for testing health-related AI tools under supervised conditions.

B. Vilne then chaired a panel discussion with all three speakers, built around five themes: the practical gap between powerful HPC/AI/TRE infrastructure and its everyday use by life-science researchers; the technical and organisational building blocks needed to analyse sensitive health and genomic data securely, and whether TREs are becoming the central model for this; how to reconcile TREs' deliberate isolation with AI Factories' and HPC's drive towards large-scale, GPU-heavy compute; each panellist's top priority for the next 3-5 years; and the potential for closer Baltic–Nordic collaboration in this space.

As previously reported, on 1 June 2025 RSU launched the project "RSU Participation in the Horizon Europe Programme" (Project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014), implementing one of Latvia's new National Partnership and Action Plans under the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI)/European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) framework: Latvia's integration into ELIXIR. As Latvia continues working towards establishing its future national ELIXIR Node, sessions such as this one illustrate the scale and direction of the infrastructure it aims to help build.