SURF, the ICT cooperative, develops its own AI environment for education
September 28, 2026
Members in the News | Tweakers – SURF, the Dutch ICT cooperative, is launching its own AI environment for the education sector. Vocational education institutions, universities of applied sciences and research universities will be able to run their own AI models and use them through a chatbot. With SURF AI, institutions can keep their data under their own control.
SURF AI is currently in a pilot phase, which will be completed by the end of this year. From next year onwards, educational institutions affiliated with SURF will, in principle, be able to use the platform.
SURF AI consists of two parts:
- An administration environment, where institutions can decide which AI models are available and manage users and applications.
- An end-user environment, featuring a chatbot that can answer questions and, for example, assist with lesson preparation.
Both commercial models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, and open models are available. Institutions can decide for themselves which models they allow. The infrastructure is hosted in Dutch data centres. When using open models, the data remains in the Netherlands. With commercial models, however, this cannot always be guaranteed.
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