ATAILA Newsroom · Event · Budapest ·
2026-W36
AI Summit Budapest opens on Monday. We will be there — and here is what we are listening for.
AI Summit Budapest 2026 runs on 7–8 September in Városliget — close to 300 speakers across eleven rooms on the campus: the Magyar Zene Háza, the Néprajzi Múzeum and the zones around them. ATAILA will be there for both days. Not with a stand and not with a pitch: we are going to listen. This is the guide we made for ourselves, published in case it is useful to you too.
What we are listening for
We read the whole programme again this morning. Exactly one session out of more than three hundred carries “sovereign AI” in the title, and one practitioner session is about the risks of cloud AI and deploying locally instead. Meanwhile the large cloud vendors hold several slots, including main-stage keynotes.
That is not a criticism of the organisers — it is an accurate reflection of the market. But it does mean the word “sovereign” will mostly be spoken next week by people who sell capacity, and much less often by anyone who operates it. Sovereignty is being discussed as a strategy. It is lived as an operational discipline: who holds the keys, who can restore the system on a bad Tuesday, and whose invoice arrives when the model gets bigger.
That gap between strategy and operations is the thing we will be listening for in every room.
The sessions we would not miss
Grouped by what we care about, quoted from the public programme. Times and rooms are as published on 4 September — the programme is still moving, so check the official schedule on the morning of each day.
Running AI locally
The closest thing on the programme to the question our customers actually ask.
- Tue 11:00–11:40, Prompt ArénaHívatlan hallgatóság? A felhőalapú AI veszélyei és lokális megoldások a gyakorlatbanGál Tamás, Safescribe
- Mon 17:20–17:40, Quantum StageESA Copernicus is Open. Why Can’t Anyone Use It? An Open-Source AI Stack for Real Earth ObservationSomogyi Viktor, Netwerk
Sovereignty
Two of the three carry the word in the title. The third is about data assets, which is the same question in different words.
- Mon 12:15–12:35, Visionary StageSzuverén AI a számítási kapacitáson túl – Európa stratégiai mozgástere az új AI-értékláncbanPalkovics Bálint, 4iG
- Tue 13:50–14:10, Visionary StageSovereign AI: The Pathway towards Equal Development of Artificial IntelligenceZhang Shuyan, Fudan University
- Mon 17:25–17:45, Visionary StageRestart Hungary! Adatvagyon és vállalkozói szabadságBalogh Petya, STRT Holding
Regulation, as an operational problem
Monday morning in Future Lab is the densest hour of the two days if this is your question.
- Mon 09:20–09:40, Future LabA szabályokat el lehet halasztani. A felelősséget nem. Az AI Act az Omnibus után: a működő AI-tól a jogilag védhető vállalati AI-igDr. Kopasz János, Taylor Wessing Hungary
- Mon 09:40–10:00, Future LabAmikor az algoritmusért már felelni kell: AI-szabályozás 2026-bandr. Vajda Viktor, Magyar Mesterséges Intelligencia Tanács
- Mon 12:55–13:15, Future LabCompliance by design: building AI-Agents that survive the EU AI actFauszt Gábor, Zenitech
- Tue 12:40–13:00, Innovation HallAI-korszak, új kockázatok – Hogyan tegyük biztonságossá és irányíthatóvá a mesterséges intelligenciát?Dr. Barta Gergő, Deloitte
- Tue 10:50–11:05, Innovation HallAz AGI-küszöb: Nemzetbiztonság, geopolitika és a szigorodó AI-szabályozásokFrész Ferenc, CyEx Group
The hardware underneath
Compute is the part of the AI conversation that cannot be improvised, and it gets the least airtime.
- Tue 11:55–12:15, Visionary StageAdatközpontok szerepe az AI ökoszisztémábanProf. Dr. Gál Zoltán, Debreceni Egyetem
- Tue 10:30–10:50, Méta Open LabKritikus infrastruktúrák védelme mesterséges intelligenciával – a hibák utáni reagálástól az előrelátó, prediktív és rendszerszintű védelemigPálfi József, Delta Sentinel
- Tue 11:15–11:35, Quantum StageA szuperszámítógép első éve: lehetőségek, tapasztalatok és kutatási irányokspeaker not yet published
Hungarian-language models
Directly relevant to anything a Hungarian company wants to run on its own hardware.
- Tue 17:25–17:45, Innovation HallMagyar LLM fejlesztésekDr. Ligeti-Nagy Noémi, ELTE Nyelvtudományi Kutatóközpont
- Tue 12:10–12:30, Cinematic StudioMagyar nyelvre magyar modellSzakács Benedek, Trendency
If anyone asks us about local AI
Short version, and it is the same thing we wrote about the Nvidia–Hugging Face deal this week: open models are free to download, free to run and free to fine-tune, and we think it has to stay that way. We run open models on our own GPUs, in our own datacentre. The weights are pulled once and live on our storage; inference never calls a hub. We deliberately run more than one serving engine, because being one runtime away from a rewrite is not a bet worth making.
The harder half is not the model. It is everything after go-live: who patches it, who is on call, who proves a year later which model version produced which answer. That is the part we sell, and it is the part the programme talks about least.
The question we will ask everyone
One question, asked of everyone we talk to over the two days:
“Which of your workflows would you not put into ChatGPT today?”
It is a better question than any pitch, because the answer is always specific and always real. Whatever that workflow is — the client files, the payroll, the test results, the contracts — it is the one that has to run somewhere you control. Everything we build exists to make that possible without hiring a platform team.
We will publish what we learn here afterwards, including the parts that contradict us.
Practical details
- When: Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 September 2026.
- Where: Városliget, Budapest — Magyar Zene Háza and Néprajzi Múzeum, plus the outdoor campus zones.
- Programme: aisummit.hu/hu/program (English: /en/program). The published ticket description includes the event app with replays, so if that holds, clashes are recoverable — which argues for picking rooms by who you want to meet rather than by what you want to hear.
- Language: most sessions are in Hungarian; international speakers present in English.
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