Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) is a pan European research initiative selected on the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures Roadmap that aims to build a European Large-scale Facility devoted to ultra intense laser and gamma beams interaction with matter. We report on the status of Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) facility, one of the three ELI pillars under construction, to be operational in 2018. Placed in Romania, ELI-NP has as core elements a couple of new generation 10 PW laser systems and a narrow bandwidth Compton backscattering gamma source with photon energies up to 19 MeV. ELI-NP will address nuclear photonics, nuclear astrophysics and quantum electrodynamics involving extreme photon fi elds. Applications in nuclear medicine, in detection and characterization of nuclear materials and in material science with positron sources are foreseen.