Lausanne’s Giotto Launches Solo and Alto, Reasoning Models Built to Run on a Single GPU or in Swiss Data Centres

Lausanne startup Giotto has introduced two reasoning models, Solo and Alto, which it says were developed in Switzerland and can be run without relying on American cloud providers, Netzwoche reported. The launch builds on the company’s portable AI approach presented in May 2026 and on a free cloud version of its assistant released in July.

The two models are aimed at different users. Solo is designed to run on a single graphics processor, which puts it within reach of a workstation. Alto is meant for more demanding reasoning tasks and for professional users, and runs on eight Nvidia B300 GPUs. Giotto says it focused on efficiency during development to cut the computing power, energy and infrastructure the models need. In an interview with Bilan, chief executive and co-founder Aldo Podestà said the company relies on test-time compute, giving a model more processing resources while it answers rather than training ever larger models.

Customers can choose how to run them: through a shared cloud hosted and operated in Europe, through a dedicated and isolated cloud in partner data centres in Switzerland or elsewhere in Europe, or directly on their own compatible hardware. Configurations range from a single-GPU workstation for Solo to multi-GPU server racks for Alto. Giotto says its cloud services are designed to meet the EU’s GDPR requirements.

What it means in practice

Podestà framed the launch as a sovereignty argument, saying Europe must offer more than a different flag on the same dependency, and that sovereignty should belong to the people and organisations using AI rather than only to those building it. That puts Giotto alongside Switzerland’s public effort, where ETH and EPFL are training Apertus 2.0 on the Alps supercomputer, and other Vaud startups such as Embodied AI, which launched with industrial robot backing.

For banks, insurers, hospitals and public bodies, the on-premises option is the most interesting part. Running a reasoning model on hardware they control could let them use AI on confidential material that cannot leave the building. The open question is quality: Giotto has not published independent benchmark comparisons with the large commercial models, and buyers will want to see how Solo performs on real tasks with only one GPU behind it.

At launch, Giotto is offering a free, anonymous chat service that needs no account, apps for iOS and Android, and free access to Alto through its shared cloud, plus an API for developers. What to watch next is pricing for dedicated deployments, which Swiss partner data centres sign on, and whether the first enterprise or public-sector customers are named.