Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND) and its Dutch counterpart, the National Agency for Disruptive Innovation (NADI), have launched a joint €40 million programme to fund radical innovations in pan-European chip design.
Announced today, the AI-Native Chip Design Challenge marks the first joint-funding initiative between SPRIND and NADI. It aims to cut chip development timelines from years to weeks and strengthen Europe’s sovereign AI capabilities.
“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 to see more nations commit to backing pan-European, radical breakthroughs. The need is great, and the model works,” said Jano Costard, Head of Challenges, SPRIND.
The AI-Native Chip Design Challenge will run across two stages over 20 months. Stage 1, from November to July 2027, will select seven teams, each receiving €2.6 million. Stage 2 will run for a further year, shortlisting three teams to receive €7 million each. Beyond capital, participating teams will get technical and commercial coaching to help bring their chip designs to market. Further financing details and dates for Stage 1 are still to be confirmed.
The Challenge seeks to scale the use of AI-driven methods in chip design, leaning on AI models now capable of reaching technical conclusions and reinforcement-learning agents able to independently tackle complex optimisation problems, with the eventual goal of AI systems handling chip design autonomously. The programme also aims to produce production-ready chip designs for high-performance AI inference and training, improving energy efficiency, scalability, and inference costs.
NADI was formally announced on 15 September 2026, when Dutch Economic Affairs Minister Heleen Herbert unveiled the agency on Prinsjesdag, the country’s annual Budget Day. It is built on the ARPA model already used by SPRIND from 2019 and by the UK’s ARIA from 2022. NADI is designed to run challenge-style programmes around specific technological problems facing the Netherlands and Europe, with the government allocating €500 million and acting as an early customer to help innovations reach the market faster.
At the time of the announcement, the minister asked entrepreneur and Cradle founder Jelle Prins to build out the organisation alongside DeepTech investor Beau-Anne Chilla. Both previously sat on the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ NADI expert panel.
The formation of NADI follows an open letter from universities, university medical centres, investors, and major companies, including Philips and NXP, with further support from Peter Wennink, former chief executive of ASML. The widely circulated Wennink Report, which called for technology and innovation investment, recommended that the Dutch government commit €1.5 to 2 billion to NADI’s deployment budget.
“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,” said Jelle Prins, co-founder of NADI.
SPRIND, whose Challenges model has deployed more than €100 million across Europe this year, has supported NADI’s formation. Earlier this year, SPRIND launched its first joint Challenge with Sweden’s Vinnova; it also collaborates with the US ARPAs and the National Science Foundation.
Europe currently relies on the US and China for semiconductor supply, a dependency exposed by this year’s energy-price pressures and supply-chain disruption. Chip design remains among the costliest and most technically demanding engineering fields, and Europe’s nascent AI-driven design market is seen as a structural bottleneck holding back the region’s wider AI ambitions.
The Challenge, which draws on the Netherlands’ €33.6 billion semiconductor sector, anchored by ASML, alongside Germany’s DeepTech and industrial manufacturing base, led by firms such as Siemens and Bosch, is seen as the first step to create technological sovereignty.
