A total of 34 million euros in infrastructure funding has been allocated to the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) for 2025. The funds have been provided under the annual round of the National Fund for Research Infrastructure and Facilities.
The Minister of University and Research, Anna Maria Bernini, signed the decree distributing a total of 94 million euros in funding to Italy’s Research Institutions for 2025.
“Our research institutions are national treasures, a source of pride for Italy and a scientific benchmark at the international level,” said Minister Anna Maria Bernini. “We have the responsibility to ensure these centers of excellence continue to grow and advance. It is essential to provide resources for new projects, support increasingly complex infrastructure, and foster the most advanced technologies,” added the Minister. “This new 94 million euros allocation from the Research Infrastructure and Facility Fund moves precisely in that direction. It enables scientific institutions to strengthen their research activities and to open new avenues of study that can generate tangible and positive outcomes to improve quality of life. We want to give continuity to an already excellent work, which is one of the country’s flagships. We believe in it. And results come from that belief.”
The new funds allocated by MUR to INFN for infrastructure will support the continuation of several strategic, multi-year initiatives that the Ministry has already been funding since 2022. Among them is the renovation and repurposing of a building at INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory, which was acquired to expand available space for experimental halls, offices, and accommodation for researchers—both from Italy and abroad—who spend extended periods working on major international experiments hosted in the underground facility. More significantly, the newly allocated funds will allow INFN to carry out new initiatives to enhance and expand its infrastructure assets.
“These are key investments not only for science but for society as a whole, given the increasingly strategic role that research infrastructure plays in advancing knowledge and technological innovation,” noted Antonio Zoccoli, president of INFN. “Specifically, thanks to MUR funding, INFN will be able to acquire and upgrade the LASA laboratory in Segrate-Milan, a center of excellence in R&D for cutting-edge technologies for particle accelerators, such as superconducting magnets and high-temperature superconducting materials—technologies that also hold great promise for the energy sustainability sector. Another area of investment will be artificial intelligence, which is rapidly expanding and increasingly relevant to society. In this context, we will co-fund the European AI Factory initiative, which involves building a high-performance computing infrastructure for the development, testing, and deployment of AI applications. Research infrastructures, consistently prioritised by Minister Bernini as essential to national research and innovation systems, are a hallmark of what’s known as Big Science, which is the environment in which INFN operates. Thanks also to funding from MUR under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), our institute is already making strategic investments to upgrade its research infrastructure and has spearheaded the National Research Center on HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing (ICSC),” Zoccoli concluded.
The 94 million euros from the Fund for Research Infrastructure and Facilities has been distributed based on the requests and projects submitted by each institution for construction and modernization work on scientific infrastructure. The monitoring of funds allocated to each institution will be carried out in line with the timeline for the implementation of the funded activities.
