The Government Bets on In-House Digital Twins and the Sovereign ‘Amália’ AI to Modernise the State, Backed by an €80 Million Training Plan

The government is developing "digital twins" of public systems — live virtual replicas fed by sensor data — and preparing to roll out its own Portuguese-language artificial-intelligence model, as part of a push to modernise the state without leaning on foreign technology providers.

The plans were set out by Gonçalo Matias, Minister for State Reform (Reforma do Estado), at a meeting in Lisbon of the network coordinating state simplification and technology. The digital twins are being built by ARTE (Agência para a Reforma Tecnológica do Estado, the State Technological Reform Agency, the renamed former AMA) and would use real-time data to forecast problems, test fixes before they are deployed and improve services such as urban mobility and emergency response.

• Digital twins: virtual models of physical systems, built in-house by ARTE rather than outsourced to foreign firms.
• Amália: Portugal’s sovereign large language model for European Portuguese, described as "ready" and due to be presented in July, with early testing in culture and education.
• Training: an €80 million plan (a first €25 million tranche) to build AI skills across the public administration.
• Savings target: some €300 million expected from standardised procurement contracts with major technology suppliers.

Matias framed Amália as "a sovereign model" suited to sensitive use cases — in healthcare, the armed forces and other areas where the state wants to keep control of its own data. The pitch matters because most off-the-shelf AI tools run on infrastructure owned abroad; a homegrown model lets Portugal keep citizens’ data inside national control while recognising the language’s own variants and cultural references.

The announcement is the latest move in a multi-year effort to drag Portugal’s famously paperwork-heavy bureaucracy into the digital age. AMA was rebranded as ARTE in 2025 precisely to lead this transformation, and Amália — first unveiled at the Web Summit — has become its flagship. Digitalisation is also a cross-cutting priority in the EU funding now flowing into Portugal, including the latest EEA Grants cycle.

What This Means for Residents

• Public services: if it works, expect faster, smarter digital interactions with the state — the portals and apps most residents already use for tax, health and social security.
• Your data: a sovereign model is pitched as keeping sensitive information under Portuguese control rather than on foreign servers.
• The catch: Portugal’s record on big IT projects is uneven, and "ready" models have a habit of taking longer to reach the front desk than the press release suggests.
• Day to day: none of this removes the need to understand how the existing systems work — from your tax-residency status to everyday admin.

For now the headline is ambition: an in-house twin of the state and a sovereign AI to run on top of it. Whether residents feel the difference will depend on execution over the coming year — starting with whether Amália actually arrives, as promised, in July. Update: the Government's LicencIA platform is meant to put an AI layer over councils' planning systems and cut licensing times by 60 to 70 percent, with pilots due before the end of 2026 (November 2026).