The AI Centre That the Paperwork Calls a Data Centre

In April 2022 a hyperscale data centre opened at Mischii, in Dolj county, presented by its founder as “the largest regional centre of excellence in artificial intelligence”; the Ministry of Finance file that paid it €17.82 million in state aid calls it, in its own words, a data centre, and counts 10 new jobs against the 21 the company signed for (Ministry of Finance, status of HG 807/2014 projects at 30 June 2026, row 53; Tema Energy project page, Georgescu quoted). (Verified: the ministry figures and title; Verified: the founder’s phrase on his integrator’s page. Probable: the Romanian launch wording, as reported by PressOne.)

This is the pattern BrokenCtrl exists to document, in its public-money form: the AI label doing work at the press conference that the asset never does in the contract.

The case rests on the investigation by Andrei Petre for PressOne, 14 October 2026, edited by Emilia Șercan, and on a July 2025 investigation by AlgorithmWatch. We read the three ministry files, the police bulletin and the Craiova council minutes behind their strongest numbers, and record below where the documents confirm them and where they correct them.

What the State Signed For

Funding agreement 177 was approved on 30 July 2020 under the state-aid scheme of Government Decision 807/2014. Its title is “Înființarea unui centru de date în cadrul Cluster Power SRL”: the establishment of a data centre. It put the eligible investment at €35.64 million, approved €17.82 million of non-reimbursable aid and committed the company to 21 new jobs. By 30 June 2026 the ministry lists the project as finished, the investment realised at 104%, the aid paid in full and 10 jobs created; the December 2025 edition carries the same row, and the beneficiary is now listed as Cluster Energy SRL, “formerly Cluster Power” (Ministry of Finance, June 2026; December 2025). (Verified, all figures, read by script from both files.) The company’s own accounts say the same thing in a different column: an average of 10 employees in 2022 and again in 2023, on revenue of 8.1 million lei and a net loss of 28.7 million lei for 2023 (Forbes România, 3 September 2024, citing the balance sheet filed with the ministry). (Verified: the Forbes page; the balance sheet itself not read by us.)

A second agreement sat behind the first. Agreement 570 of 14 November 2022 approved €39.83 million of aid for “a data centre within Fastsens SRL”, a project valued at €82.76 million with 101 jobs committed; at 31 December 2025 the ministry recorded it as in progress, 0% realised, nothing paid. By letter of 20 February 2026 the ministry revoked it, having paid nothing and recovering nothing, and the beneficiary is listed as Cluster Sense, formerly Fastsens (Ministry of Finance, revocations register, row 42; December 2025 status file, row 148). (Verified. PressOne reports €36 million; the register says €39.83 million approved, €0 paid.) Alongside the grants sat a credit of 175.3 million lei from CEC Bank, the state-owned bank, under a state guarantee (PressOne, 14 October 2026; the same figure and the state guarantee appear in the police communiqué below). (Verified: CEC Bank is a creditor of the company holding credit contracts, in the court record cited below. Probable: the guarantee itself, from the communiqué and PressOne; the instrument is not public.)

The words “artificial intelligence” appear in none of the three ministry files. (Verified: text search of all three, 20 October 2026; “artificial” returns nothing, and the one “inteligent” belongs to another company’s project.)

Where the AI Language Lived

The words the funding documents do not contain are the ones the project was sold with. The integrator’s own project page describes a “centre of excellence in artificial intelligence”, “Nvidia based A.I.”, and a project that “brought Romania on the global data centre map”, and quotes the founder, Cosmin Georgescu, calling it the largest regional centre of its kind (Tema Energy). (Verified: the page; it is the company’s language as carried by its contractor.) Two months before the opening, on 28 February 2022, a Craiova councillor told the city council that the centre would employ “over 300 people”, most of them Craiova residents, and asked for public transport to Mischii; the mayor, Lia Olguța Vasilescu, answered that they should be hired first, and that buses could follow a request that had not been made (Craiova City Council, minutes of 28 February 2022, pp. 40–41). (Verified: read from the minutes.) In April she attended the launch, with the prefect and the county council president in support, and the then minister for research and digitalisation, Sebastian Burduja, met the company and described its people as capable men who understand the future (PressOne, 14 October 2026). (Probable: quoted by PressOne; the original remarks not read by us.)

The claim travelled further than the jobs. According to AlgorithmWatch, the authorities classified the project as one of “negligible environmental impact” and exempted it from the environmental-permit requirement, while the company’s own technical memo filed with the environment agency planned for around 50 million litres of water a year drawn from wells on its land, roughly the drinking water of 70,000 people (AlgorithmWatch, 31 July 2025). (Verified: AlgorithmWatch’s text; the memo and the exemption decision not read by us. The site’s location in the drought-prone “Sahara of Oltenia” is PressOne’s framing, not AlgorithmWatch’s.) The campus is rated for 200 MW (Tema Energy). (Verified as the company’s figure.)

Read against the country, the label is stranger still. In 2025 Romania had the lowest share of companies using any AI technology in the European Union, 5.2% against an EU average of 20% (Eurostat, 11 December 2025). (Verified.) In the Union’s slowest adopter, an AI centre of excellence opened with a minister, a mayor and a prefect in the room says more about what the word could sell than about where the economy stood. To us the label smelled of something old, public money wearing whatever word is in fashion that year, and in Romania there is nothing new in that smell. (Interpretation: BrokenCtrl’s reading.)

The Strongest Defence

The fairest reading of the record favours the company on one point that matters. The money was spent on what the contract described: the ministry records the investment realised at 104%, a Tier III certified building full of servers exists at Mischii, and the scheme under which it was funded pays for investment, not for artificial intelligence. Data centres are capital-heavy and employ few people by design; 21 jobs was a modest commitment, and a councillor’s 300 was never anyone’s. The second grant cost the state nothing, because nothing was paid. Nobody named in this story has been charged, and no court has found wrongdoing. (Verified: the 104%, the certification, the job and payment figures. Verified: no conviction or court finding is on the public record we read.)

That defence holds for the concrete. It does not reach the claim. The “centre of excellence for artificial intelligence” was never a term of the contract, which is why it could never be measured against one; it existed only where it bought attention, endorsements and the authority of the word. Of the one commitment the state could count, it got less than half.

No single piece of the Romanian machine failed on its own. All of them did, and each made the next one easier. The grant was measured in euros spent on a building, so a building full of servers was enough to mark the project 104% done with half the jobs missing. The bank credit, by the police account, carried a state guarantee, so the risk of the loan sat with the same state that had already paid the grant. When the money ran short, the court procedure froze the creditors, the state bank among them, while the company announced a project four times larger. A Romanian state built this way does not need anyone to lie to lose money; it only needs nobody to read the file. (Interpretation: BrokenCtrl’s reading of the mechanism; each step is labelled where it is reported.)

What Happened After the Money Was Paid

On 23 October 2025 the Bucharest police, under the prosecutor’s office of the Bucharest Tribunal, executed 35 search warrants in Bucharest and eight counties, Dolj and Vâlcea among them. Their communiqué describes a state-guaranteed bank credit of about 175.3 million lei moved the same day into two companies, about 35 million lei of it later reaching the personal account of the administrator of the firm that took the credit, on contracts the investigators consider fictitious; it adds that the first company had also received over 85.5 million lei of non-reimbursable funds, and it names nobody (Bucharest Police item of 23 October 2025, in the ATOP monitoring report; Agerpres via G4Media, 23 October 2025). (Verified: the communiqué text. Law 9: an investigation, not a finding.) The two figures match the credit PressOne reports and the €17.82 million the ministry paid, and PressOne’s sources identify the file with the Mischii investment, naming the company’s founder, Cosmin Georgescu, and Bogdan Stoica of Actual Connect as under investigation, and Bit Invest as appearing in the file. (Unverified: anonymous sources, attributed as such; the matching figures are our inference.) Georgescu asked for written questions and had not answered by publication. Stoica told PressOne he had no knowledge of what was described, and when asked whether he was the Stoica of Actual Connect, said yes, and that he knew nothing of the matter. Andrei Drăgușin of Bit Invest confirmed he had been heard and said the company had delivered the services it was contracted for and was cooperating (PressOne, 14 October 2026). (Probable: the responses as PressOne records them.)

Nineteen days after the searches, on 11 November 2025, Cluster Energy, the company’s name since it stopped being Cluster Power, filed at the Dolj Tribunal for preventive composition, a court-supervised procedure for companies in difficulty short of insolvency. The court opened it on 14 November, appointed an administrator and suspended every enforcement against the company for four months. CEC Bank, listed among the creditors, appealed the opening; the Craiova Court of Appeal asked it to produce its credit contracts, the due dates and the last payment received, and on 7 May 2026 the bank withdrew its appeal. On 21 April 2026 the tribunal approved the amended restructuring plan, which suspends individual enforcement for the creditors it covers; the file’s next hearing is set for 26 January 2027 (Dolj Tribunal, file 4405/63/2025; Craiova Court of Appeal, file 4405/63/2025/a1). (Verified: the court portal’s own case records, read 20 Oct 2026. The record does not say what the bank’s claims are worth, and does not tie them to the guaranteed credit in the police communiqué.)

The Promise That Did Not Move

Twenty days after the searches, and the day after the company filed for court protection, on 12 November 2025, Ziarul Financiar reported that ClusterPower had signed a partnership with Accelerated Infrastructure Capital of Hong Kong to develop an 800 MW “AI-dedicated” data-centre region in south-west Romania (ZF English, 12 November 2025). (Verified: the report; the signing date not stated.) In December the partners’ announcement carried the founder’s words: “one of Europe’s largest AI-focused data center regions”, “Nvidia-certified infrastructure”, and the goal “to position Romania as a strategic hub for AI innovation” (announcement as carried by Baxtel, 3 January 2026; DatacenterDynamics, 19 December 2025). (Verified: the quoted words and the date, at DatacenterDynamics’ own page.) The same release gave the existing Mischii campus 10 MW of capacity “today”. (Verified as the companies’ figure, against the 200 MW of the integrator’s page.) The announcement mentions no searches, no court procedure and no revoked grant.

By then the record held 10 jobs of 21, a criminal investigation into the guaranteed credit, and a company under court supervision; two months later the second grant was revoked with nothing paid. The language describing the project was the same as the day the first grant was signed, with the capacity figure multiplied by four.

Every desk on that route could have asked what “artificial intelligence” meant in a file that only ever said data centre: the ministry before it paid in 2020, the state bank before it lent against a state guarantee, the minister who came to the launch, the press that repeated the phrase. The record we read shows none of them asking; the nearest thing to a question is the mayor’s “let’s see them hired first”, two months before the opening. We read that silence as a Romanian habit: the ease of a room where everyone could guess the answer. (Interpretation: BrokenCtrl’s reading. The absence of the question is Verified for the documents we read, not for every conversation.)

Romania paid €17.82 million for a data centre that was sold to the public as an artificial-intelligence centre, and the only promise its own funding file could measure was kept by less than half.

Sources

Not read for this piece: the environment agency’s technical memo and its exemption decision (anpm.ro could not be reached on 20 October 2026), and the state-guarantee instrument for the CEC Bank credit, which is not public. Status: Active. The court file’s next hearing is 26 January 2027.