THE BIG STORY: Federating AI Factories at Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026

CHAIN++ goes quantum-ready, and data sovereignty takes the main stage

From 23 to 25 September, BRAIN++ co-organised Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026 at Sofia Tech Park. Over three days our team showed how sovereign compute and decentralised trust fit together: the infrastructure that runs AI, and the guarantees that make organisations willing to share data on it.

CHAIN++: Federating AI Factories, Quantum-Ready

At ETHSofia 2026 on 24 September, Kiril Kalchev, System Architect for the Data Lake at BRAIN++, asked a practical question: how do you build trust between AI systems that do not share an operator?

• Federated AI Factories: CHAIN++ is our permissioned blockchain platform that connects AI Factories across facilities, with tamper-evident data provenance and policy-governed access, and no central operator.
• Post-quantum trust: a live look at the move to post-quantum signatures (ML-DSA-65 / FIPS 204) and a polymorphic chain that rotates algorithm policies by epoch.
• From a live deployment: a practitioner's view from a working HPC and AI Factory environment, not a whitepaper or a roadmap.

Data Sovereignty and AI: Keeping Business Data Local

On 25 September, at the Future Finance Forum (F3) in John Atanasoff Hall, Prof. Simeon Stoyanov, Manager of BRAIN++ and Business Development Director of the Discoverer supercomputer, joined Preslav Nakov (MBZUAI), Hristo Todorov (DiscreteStack) and Milan de Reede (NanoGPT) on the panel.

The question was one that banks, fintechs and enterprises are deciding right now: how to innovate with advanced AI while keeping data local, under institutional control, compliant with EU regulation and independent of foreign infrastructure.

Why It Matters

Data sovereignty and federated infrastructure are becoming preconditions for AI adoption across Central and Eastern Europe. CHAIN++ is BRAIN++'s contribution to that foundation, and it will be released as open source.

Three Days, Four Teams:
The BIO-RED Cross-Regional Hackathon

From 9 to 11 September, Sofia Tech Park and BRAIN++ hosted the BIO-RED Cross-Regional Hackathon 2026. Researchers, healthcare professionals, technology experts, entrepreneurs and public sector representatives from several European regions worked in four multidisciplinary teams to turn health innovation challenges into concrete solutions and business cases.

The Challenges

• Regulatory, ethical and market readiness of AI diagnostics
• Cross-border health data sharing and federated validation
• A Health Data Hub and access to AI and HPC resources
• Digital transformation of municipal healthcare facilities in Sofia

Our Role

Prof. Simeon Stoyanov and Kiril Kirilov opened the programme with keynote lectures that set the scientific and technological frame, and then advised all four teams through to the final pitches. The strongest business cases continue in the Biotech & Pharma Accelerator Programme.

Our thanks go to the Health and Life Sciences Cluster Bulgaria, the BIO-RED consortium and the Spinoff Europa initiative for the partnership.

From the AI Factory to AI Sovereignty:
AI Industrial Summit 2026

On Saturday, 12 September, Bulgaria's technology community filled the Laboratory Complex at Sofia Tech Park for the AI Industrial Summit 2026. BRAIN++ was a co-organiser, delivered four talks and took part in the panel discussions, starting with the opening panel, AI NEXT: From Intelligence to Industrial Impact.

BRAIN++ on Stage

• Prof. Simeon Stoyanov: Bulgaria's path to AI sovereignty, and why a human must stay accountable in the loop.
• Zvezdelin Borisov: agentic workflows, and turning AI use cases into systems that can be deployed.
• Elizabeth Koleva: open versus closed large models, and who controls the environment in which AI agents act.
• Christina Baytcheva: vibe coding versus traditional business process automation.

The conversations continued long after the sessions, and interest in the AI Factory's services for the public sector, SMEs and startups was the strongest we have seen so far. Thank you to the organisers and to everyone who stopped to talk to us.

With Europe's HPC Community:
EuroHPC User Days 2026 in Dublin

From 22 to 24 September, the BRAIN++ team was in Dublin for the fourth edition of the EuroHPC User Days at the Clayton Hotel Burlington Road. The conference was organised by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking together with the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) and Ireland's Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, under Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the EU. It brought together around 700 participants on site and 200 online.

BRAIN++ in Dublin

• Presenting the AI Factory: on Tuesday morning Prof. Simeon Stoyanov, Kiril Kirilov, Vladislav Rusanov and Elizabeth Koleva presented the Bulgarian AI Factory BRAIN++ to the EuroHPC community.
• Demo Lab: on Wednesday from 16:00 to 18:30 we were in the Demo Lab, showing live on the big screen what the Discoverer supercomputer in Sofia can do: a galaxy collision simulation and quantum error correction running on its GPU nodes.
• Meetings: three days of conversations with users, with colleagues from the EuroHPC hosting sites and the other AI Factories, and with the EuroHPC JU team. Our team also helped the organisers on site.

On the Agenda

• Plenary sessions on access to quantum computing, computational architectures, federation and AI Factories and AI Factory Antennas
• Parallel sessions with user projects, from life sciences and climate modelling to engineering, European large language models and quantum use cases
• Awards for the best EuroHPC users and the best scientific papers

In Memoriam:
Prof. Ivan Dimov (1952–2026)

On 2 September we said goodbye to Prof. Ivan Dimov, DSc, one of Bulgaria's most distinguished contemporary scientists and an internationally recognised authority in mathematical modelling, supercomputing and high-performance computing. Over a long career he was Director of the Institute for Parallel Processing, Scientific Secretary of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Minister of Education and Science. His contribution was key to two of Bulgaria's most advanced technology projects of recent years: the Discoverer+ petascale supercomputer and the BRAIN++ AI Factory. The teams of Sofia Tech Park, Discoverer+ and BRAIN++ extend their deepest condolences to his family, colleagues and the scientific community. His legacy will keep inspiring the next generations of researchers.

Read the tribute

Over the Summer

PULSE did not appear in July and August. Here is what you may have missed.

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