SPRIND and NADI launch €40M challenge to reinvent European chip design

SPRIND, Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, and NADI, the Dutch National Agency for Disruptive Innovation and SPRIND’s emergent Dutch counterpart, today launch a programme committing €40 million to technologists developing radical innovations in pan-European chip design processes.

The AI-Native Chip Design Challenge is the first joint-funding initiative between SPRIND and NADI and aims to cut chip development timeframes from years to weeks and, in turn, strengthen Europe’s sovereign AI capabilities.

Building a Dutch engine for disruptive innovation

NADI, announced earlier this year, is in the process of formal establishment in the Netherlands. A major initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, it is modelled after SPRIND, ARPAs, and ARIA. The influential Wennink Report, led by independent government advisor and former ASML

CEO Peter Wennink, recommended a minimum commitment of €1.5-2 billion from the Dutch government for NADI’s deployment budget.

SPRIND has been closely involved in NADI’s formation process. Like SPRIND, NADI will deploy significant government funding to back radical, high-risk innovations across Europe with the potential for extreme positive benefits to societies and economies.

SPRIND — which the 2024 Draghi Report identified as the optimal model for public innovation funding in Europe — serves as the nexus of a growing network of governmental agencies focused on transnational collaboration. Earlier this year, SPRIND launched its first Challenge, jointly run with Vinnova, Sweden’s disruptive innovation agency, and has collaborative relationships with ARPAs and the US National Science Foundation.

SPRIND’s Challenges model has committed more than €100 million in 2026 alone to funding high-risk scientific and technological breakthroughs across Europe. The agency is currently consulting with other major European economies on forming their own counterparts, also based on the SPRIND model.

Europe’s chip design bottleneck

Europe currently depends on the US and China to supply semiconductor chips, which underpin all three regions’ AI capabilities. Beyond the risks of dependency on other markets, which have highlighted acute vulnerabilities this year amidst rising global energy prices and supply chain disruption, chip design is currently one of the most complex and costly engineering endeavours.

Demand for specialised solutions continues to grow amid a booming AI market, offering sizable economic opportunities.

But Europe’s currently nascent AI-driven chip design market remains a structural innovation bottleneck which slows production and stifles the region’s AI boom.

Jano Costard, SPRIND’s Head of Challenges, comments: 

"The launch of NADI’s first programme is a huge statement of Europe’s intent to combine two of the continent’s greatest strengths: collaboration and innovation.

We expect more nations to commit to backing pan-European, radical breakthroughs. The need is great, and the model works.”

Jelle Prins, Co-founder of NADI, shared:

“NADI’s mission is to catalyse breakthrough innovation in areas of significant societal and economic importance.

We are excited to run our first Challenge together with SPRIND, on a topic that is strategically relevant for the Netherlands and Europe.

SPRIND has been advising the Dutch government on how to set up NADI, and this collaboration is the next opportunity for us to learn from their experience.”

In its inaugural cooperative funding Challenge, NADI brings together the Netherlands’ renowned chip expertise, leveraging a €33.6-billion semiconductor sector anchored by chip technology giants such as ASML.

Meanwhile Germany sits at the centre of Europe’s deeptech and industrial manufacturing capabilities powered by Siemens, Bosch, etc.

A look at the AI-Native Chip Design Challenge

SPRIND's Challenges programme comprises competitive, pan-European funding deployments that aim to accelerate radical solutions to major societal problems.

For the first time, AI models can draw technical conclusions. At the same time, reinforcement learning and AI agents can independently solve complex optimisation problems, allowing AI tools to eventually take on chip design autonomously.

The programme will also develop production-ready chip designs for high-performance AI inference and training, as well as AI applications, helping increase energy efficiency, improve scalability, and lower inference costs.

AI-Native Chip Design will run in two stages over 20 months, with a total funding of €40 million, with the majority funded by SPRIND and NADI funding the remainder.

Stage 1, running from November to July 2027, will select seven teams, each receiving €2.6 million, followed by Stage 2, running for a full year and shortlisting three teams, each receiving €7 million. Beyond funding, teams will also receive technical and commercial coaching to ensure their chip designs are market-ready.

Exact financing details and Stage 1 dates will follow.