AI Literacy Is Emerging As Malta's Next Competitive Advantage

Malta's approach to artificial intelligence (AI) has so far focused heavily on infrastructure: compute capacity, chips, cloud storage and the national frameworks behind them. In June, the European Commission's Technological Sovereignty Package set out the scale of that ambition across the bloc, with investment commitments running past 2035. Malta has positioned itself within this effort, hosting an EU AI Factory Antenna, CALYPSO. Led by the Malta Digital Innovation Authority (MDIA) and linked to Greece's PHAROS AI Factory, CALYPSO gives local startups, SMEs, researchers and public bodies access to European supercomputing resources.

But infrastructure is only part of the picture, according to Kenneth Brincat, CEO of MDIA and a doctoral researcher in digital innovation readiness. Writing in a recent opinion piece published in Times of Malta, Brincat argues that alongside data sovereignty and technological ownership, a third factor is increasingly important to how a country manages its digital future: whether its population can actually use, and critically assess, the AI tools now shaping daily life and work.

This reasoning underpins Malta's AI for All programme, a free literacy course developed with the University of Malta and launched by the MDIA. Participants access the course through their eID and, on completion, can choose a year's subscription to ChatGPT Plus or Microsoft Copilot. Brincat notes that with Malta already ranking third in the EU for generative AI use, according to Eurostat, the aim is to bring existing usage into a more structured, better-understood setting, while giving the country a clearer aggregate picture of how AI adoption is unfolding across sectors.

He also points to the programme as an early example of Malta implementing the EU AI Act's own literacy requirements, part of a wider governance framework the country has moved quickly to adopt domestically.

As AI becomes more embedded in economic activity, Brincat suggests, the countries best placed to benefit may not simply be those with the most infrastructure, but those whose workforces and institutions can apply these tools with confidence and judgement.