Portugal launches Amalia, its first open-source AI model
Portugal launched Amalia as an open-source base model, funded with €5.5 million in EU recovery money, to cut dependence on U.S. AI power.
Portugal unveiled Amalia, its first open-source AI model, in Lisbon. Built by a consortium of Portuguese universities and research institutions with government backing, the model was financed with €5.5 million from the Recovery and Resilience Plan.
Amalia is fully focused on Portuguese language and culture and is meant to be a foundation model, not a consumer app. The release includes the model itself, its training data and source code, so public institutions, companies, universities and researchers can adapt it for their own systems.
Prime Minister Luís Montenegro framed the launch as a matter of sovereignty as much as technology, tying Europe’s strategic autonomy to AI and saying the model would help Portugal face the coming decades with greater independence and less reliance on foreign providers. Portugal first announced the Portuguese-language large language model at Web Summit in Lisbon on Nov. 11, 2024. It later scheduled a beta version for the end of March 2025, a base version for September 2025 and a multimodal final version for the second quarter of 2026.
Planned uses include a virtual museum guide, a decision-support tool for the Portuguese Navy, an AI teaching assistant for lesson planning and a digital assistant for public services. Customized systems also have uses in banking, insurance, telecommunications and industry, where companies want productivity gains without pushing sensitive data into outside clouds.
Amalia benefits from access to Deucalion in Portugal and MareNostrum 5 in Barcelona. Deucalion was inaugurated in Guimarães in 2023 as part of the EuroHPC initiative, while MareNostrum 5 opened in Barcelona in December 2023 and the European Commission called it one of the world’s 10 most powerful supercomputers.
The launch mirrors national efforts in France and Germany, where governments have backed home-grown AI companies such as Mistral AI and Aleph Alpha. Portugal’s 2026-27 National Digital Strategy makes the National Artificial Intelligence Agenda the main instrument for carrying out the country’s AI goals, and in January 2026 the government said the agenda represented more than €400 million in investment, mostly from European funds, including €25 million for AI adoption in public administration.
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