SKOPJE and SAN FRANCISCO. Self Labs, the Silicon Valley company building sovereign AI and privacy-preserving identity infrastructure, and BDG Agency, the Skopje-based firm known for its work at the intersection of business, marcomms, and public communication, today announced a strategic partnership to advance sovereign artificial intelligence in the Balkans.
Artificial intelligence is becoming the defining infrastructure of this century, as foundational as energy grids or financial systems. Yet for most nations, the models their citizens increasingly rely on are built abroad, trained on foreign data, aligned to foreign values, and operated under foreign law. For the countries of Southeast Europe, whose languages are among the least represented in today’s frontier AI systems, the stakes are particularly high: a generation that studies, works, and creates through models that render its language poorly risks losing far more than convenience.
The partnership brings together Self Labs’ technical capabilities, including its playbook for adapting powerful open AI models to a nation’s own language, knowledge, and values, and its production zero-knowledge identity infrastructure trusted by partners including global public companies to protect their data sovereignty, with BDG’s deep regional roots, institutional relationships, and understanding of what it takes to deliver technology in Southeast Europe. Together the partners will work to make sovereign AI real in the region: national models owned and governed where they are used, run on local infrastructure, auditable by local institutions, and accessible to everyone.
“Small languages and small markets have always been an afterthought for the big platforms; sovereign AI is how our region stops being an afterthought.”
Central to that vision is Universal Basic Compute (UBC): the principle that every citizen deserves a basic allocation of AI capability, in their own language, on whatever device they have, free at the point of use. Where universal basic income distributes money, UBC distributes productive capability, seeding entrepreneurship, skills, and economic participation.
“The Balkans have the talent, the infrastructure, ambition, and the motivation to show Europe what sovereign AI actually looks like. In BDG we found a partner that knows the region, its institutions, and its people, and shares our conviction that this is the moment to act. ”
The partnership’s initial focus is North Macedonia, where the partners are collaborating on topics related to sovereign AI, including Universal Basic Compute, national language models, and the role of AI in the region’s research and development economy, with engagement across the technology community, academia, and industry, including through the Economic Chamber of North Macedonia.
Self Labs: [email protected]
BDG Agency: [email protected]
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