DAMA recounts the transformation of the former tobacco factory into a platform for research, big data, AI, and industry with the help of the local community.

Three videos accompany the path with which Bologna transformed a great twentieth-century industrial architecture into one of the main European infrastructures dedicated to supercomputing, big data, and artificial intelligenceThe story starts from the new profile of WOMEN, the Tecnopolo Data Manifattura Emilia-Romagna, and then returns to the two timelapse sequences showing the construction of the new buildings and the installation of the supercomputer Leonardo.

The value of the images is not only spectacular. The accelerated succession of construction sites, technical rooms, racks, systems and converted spaces allows us to see a process that normally remains invisible: the material birth of thedigital infrastructureBehind the word “cloud”, behind AI and behind the computing power needed for research, there are buildings, cables, cooling systems, energy, engineering skills and public governance.

DAMA occupies the area of ​​the former Manifattura Tabacchi of Bologna, a complex of approximately 140 thousand square meters designed and built in the 1950s by Pier Luigi NerviThe choice to locate a data hub here does not erase the industrial memory of the place, but updates it: where once manufacturing production, logistics and manual labour were concentrated, today they are concentrated High-performance computing, meteorology, scientific research, AI, and applications for businesses and institutions.

The most recent video presents DAMA as an infrastructure that is not closed in itself, but inserted into the Data Valley of Emilia-Romagna. ART-ER Describes the Tecnopolo as an international center of excellence for supercomputing, Big Data, and artificial intelligence, with applications in meteorology, climatology, health, earth sciences, and industry. This diversity makes it more than a data center: a place where data becomes decision-making capacity, applied research and industrial policy.

The second level of the story concerns Leonardo, the supercomputer EuroHPC managed by CINECAIn the videos dedicated to its assembly, computing power takes on a concrete form: cabinets, modules, connections, technical corridors and installation procedures show how much contemporary research depends on aextremely complex physical infrastructureLeonardo is indicated by DAMA as one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and is capable of running over 250 million billion operations per second.

Its location in Bologna also has a European dimension. In the list TOP500 of November 2025, Leonardo is ranked tenth in the world, with an HPL performance of 241,2 petaflops per second, confirming Italy's role in the international high-performance computing network. This figure is important because it explains why the Technopole is not just a regional project: it is a piece of the European computational sovereignty.

Another decisive element is the presence of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. ECMWF extension indicates its Bologna data center right inside DAMA, in the area formerly known as Manifattura Tabacchi. This places the Tecnopolo in a scientific chain that connects climate simulations, weather models, risk management and large amounts of environmental data.

Taken together, the videos show three times of the same transformation. The first is the urban time, that of the regeneration of a disused industrial areaThe second is the technological time, marked by the arrival of HPC infrastructure, computing systems and data centersThe third is the political and economic time, in which a region tries to build a platform around the data for research, business, public services and international competitiveness.

The strength of the story lies precisely in this overlapping. DAMA is not presented as a symbolic building, but as a operational body: it hosts machines, institutions, skills and different functions. It is a data citadel in which computing power is used for science, but also for meteorology, health, manufacturing, sustainability, and the design of new services.

Timelapse sequences make visible an often underestimated step: thedigital innovation It doesn't just come from software. It also comes from the ability to build suitable, connected, safe, and technically robust places. Bologna thus becomes an interesting case for Europe: a city that recovers a fragment of its industrial history and converts it into infrastructure for the knowledge, computation and artificial intelligence.

In the overall story, the Tecnopolo is not just Leonardo's headquarters, but the meeting point between urban memory and the computational futureThe images of the construction sites and engine rooms tell the story of a concrete transition: from bricks to GPUs, from factories to data, from traditional manufacturing to a new infrastructure for European research and innovation.

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Timelapse video of the growth of the new Big Data Technopole buildings