Germany and the Netherlands team up to develop AI chips
Germany and the Netherlands are launching a joint program to develop a new generation of processors for artificial intelligence. €40 million will be allocated to the project, and one of its main goals will be to drastically reduce the time needed to create new chips.
The program is being launched by the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation SPRIND and the newly created Dutch National Agency for Disruptive Innovation (NADI), Tech.eu reports.
The AI-Native Chip Design Challenge will last 20 months. Its participants must use artificial intelligence directly for chip design and try to shorten the development cycle, which can currently take years, to significantly shorter periods.
The program will cover chips for both training AI models and inference – the direct operation of a trained model. Organizers see significant potential in the latter segment, where not all tasks require the most powerful and expensive accelerators like Nvidia's solutions.
At the first stage, it is planned to select seven teams. Each will be able to receive €2.6 million. After that, the three most promising teams will move on to the second stage and receive €7 million each to bring their developments to a level suitable for practical use.
For the Netherlands, this will be one of the first major programs of the new NADI agency. The government has allocated €500 million to it. The agency is to finance risky technological projects that could lead to breakthroughs but often do not receive enough support from private investors at early stages.
NADI is being built on the model of specialized disruptive innovation agencies like the American DARPA and the German SPRIND. The state can thus not only fund developments but also act as the first customer for promising technologies.
The partners hope to combine the strengths of both countries. The Netherlands has one of the world’s most powerful semiconductor technology clusters around ASML, which produces key equipment for manufacturing modern chips. Germany has a large industrial base and strong positions in applied research and manufacturing.
The joint program fits into the broader European policy of reducing technological dependence on other regions. The Dutch government has previously explicitly called the dependence of European AI infrastructure on a small number of non-European suppliers an economic and security risk.
In April, the Netherlands also presented a national strategy for developing the semiconductor sector until 2035. It envisages more active state stimulation of new technologies and the creation of additional production capacities in Europe.
For Germany and the Netherlands, the new program is meant to be not an attempt to directly copy existing processors from American manufacturers but a search for alternative architectures and design methods that could give European companies their own competitive advantages in the rapidly growing AI market.
Based on materials from: Tech.eu, Government of the Netherlands
