Poland Is Going All In on AI, Starting With ElevenLabs. Here's What That Looks Like in Kraków.

Luke Loveridge
Jul 7
3 min read

In June, Poland's state development bank BGK announced it was putting $11 million into ElevenLabs to help build a national AI hub.

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ElevenLabs - the Polish-founded, now $11-billion-valued voice AI company behind tools used by Spotify and Meta - is expanding its Warsaw office to 200+ employees, and the government's new AI Lab Poland initiative will use the partnership to connect early-stage startups with funding and expertise.

It's the kind of headline that signals something bigger: the Polish government is actively betting on AI as a growth sector, not just watching from the sidelines. And that ambition isn't confined to Warsaw. Three hundred kilometers south, Kraków has spent years quietly building the infrastructure, research base, and company track record that this kind of state-backed push depends on.

The compute is in Kraków

Kraków is building the Gaia AI Factory - a EuroHPC-funded supercomputer project that will run more than a thousand GPUs once it comes online in the second half of 2027. It's a €70 million investment, split evenly between Poland and the EU, and it will make Kraków one of nineteen "sovereign AI compute hubs" recognized across the European Union.

It isn't running yet, but it's real, funded, and already positioning the city as a future home for the unglamorous, capital-intensive infrastructure layer underneath every flashy AI announcement.

Compute alone doesn't make a tech hub. But paired with everything else already sitting in Kraków, it starts to look less like a coincidence and more like a pattern.

NATO picked Kraków for its defense-tech accelerator

Kraków is now home to DIANA - NATO's Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic - run jointly by AGH University of Kraków and Kraków Technology Park under the local name "FORT Kraków," officially opened in January 2026.

DIANA exists to fast-track dual-use deep tech: technologies with both civilian and defense applications, from robotics to quantum to secure communications. Landing a NATO innovation program isn't a symbolic gesture; it's an acknowledgment that the surrounding research and talent base can actually support it.

The research base has been compounding for decades

That base is AGH University of Kraków, a technical university that's granted close to 100 patents a year and consistently ranks among Poland's top patent-producing institutions, with research spanning nanotechnology, space engineering, and materials science.

Alongside Jagiellonian University and Kraków University of Technology, AGH co-founded Kraków Technology Park in 1997 - a science park that's spent almost 30 years turning academic research into companies.

This is the slow, unglamorous infrastructure-building that rarely makes headlines - decades of academic-industry pipelines, long before "deep tech" was a category VCs had a name for.

And the company track record backs it up

Kraków isn't a research base with no output to show for it.

Comarch - one of Poland's largest software companies - was founded here in 1993 by an AGH professor and is still headquartered in the city.

Synerise, an AI company built on behavioral-data modeling, is homegrown too, and works closely with AGH's research programs.

Together they're proof the city has been converting research and talent into real, globally competitive companies for years, well before this month's headline.

The takeaway

Poland's $11 million bet on ElevenLabs is one visible signal of a bigger government push: the state is actively investing to make AI a national growth sector, not just hoping it happens.

Kraków is where a lot of that ambition is already playing out on the ground - the compute under construction, the defense-tech accelerator, the research pipeline, and a growing bench of companies to show for it.