Netherlands and Germany to allocate €40 million for AI chip design — Channel NewsAsia

The Dutch National Agency for Disruptive Innovation, NADI, will cooperate with the German agency SPRIND to accelerate the development of computer chips for artificial intelligence. As part of the 20-month project, the agencies will allocate €40 million to small teams that will use AI to design chips, Channel NewsAsia reports.

Chip design using AI

The project concerns chips for training and running AI models. NADI co-founder Jelle Prins noted that the partnership with Germany is natural given the ecosystem around Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML, as well as Germany's capabilities in research and manufacturing.

According to Prins, NVIDIA chips are powerful but inefficient for inference tasks. SPRIND competition programmes head Jano Kosterd told Reuters that the project's goal is to speed up the chip development process by several orders of magnitude. The process currently takes years.

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European innovation agencies

NADI was created this month with €500 million in state funding. The agency is called the Dutch counterpart of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, founded in 1958.

In Europe, France established the defense innovation agency AID in 2018, Germany created SPRIND in 2019, and the United Kingdom launched ARIA in 2023. Separately, SPRIND is holding a competition with a €125 million budget aimed at creating three European frontier artificial intelligence laboratories.