Work/Foresight Institute, Berlin
How we built the Berlin Node
Our Berlin Node is a dedicated research floor and server room at CIC Berlin, and the easiest way to describe it is by what it is not: not a coworking space, because we are not optimising for desks filled; not an accelerator, because there is no equity and no demo day; and not a corporate lab, because nobody here can be told what to research. What is left is physical research infrastructure for public-interest AI, which in practice means more than thirty researchers onboarded across six batches, an on-premise GPU cluster they can walk downstairs and put a hand on, and a floor that other organisations have started to programme on rather than merely attend.
The floor
- Opened 1 April 2026.
- Dedicated research floor and permanent on-premise server room, CIC Berlin, Kreuzberg.
- AI for Science & Safety, inside the Foresight Institute.
The server room
- On-premise GPU cluster, built from network to cabinets.
- Purpose-built server room, completed July 2026.
- Every resident who wants compute has working access.
- The cluster runs multiple frontier models and supports small-scale training.
- A dedicated DevOps hire started August 2026.
Salons
- Salons twice a month, every month since opening.
- Five of the seven named Berlin salon speakers this year were Node residents presenting their own work.
On the floor
- SAIGE held its first-ever in-person event at the Node in April 2026, and co-hosted the European Frontier AI Safety Day at CIC Berlin on 5 September 2026.
- The California Institute for Machine Consciousness brought its Computational Consciousness conference to the Node on 11 September 2026.
- Apart Research has run three hackathons in the space.
- AI Safety Berlin holds nine seats next door.
- Secure & Sovereign AI Workshop, 18 to 19 July 2026, with speakers from Google DeepMind, Oxford, EPFL, UC Berkeley, Peking University and the Ethereum Foundation.
- Foresight Village at DWeb Camp, the Internet Archive's gathering, Alte Hölle, July 2026.
Writing the model down
- Principal author of the AI Nodes positioning paper (internal, about 5,000 words), the Node Precepts, and the community guide.
- Monthly public Node Manager's Diary on Substack. The April and May 2026 entry is the one that is up.