A newly established Dutch agency focused on strategic innovation announced on Wednesday that it will collaborate with its German counterpart to pursue breakthroughs in artificial intelligence chip design, marking another step in Europe's broader effort to reduce its reliance on American technology.
The Dutch National Agency for Disruptive Innovation, known as NADI, was launched this month with 500 million euros (approximately $570 million) in government funding. The agency is positioned as the Dutch equivalent of the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was created in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite and played a pivotal role in technologies that led to the internet, stealth aircraft, and GPS.
Leveraging the ASML ecosystem
Jelle Prins, co-founder of NADI, said collaboration with Germany in the chip sector was a natural step given the strong ecosystem surrounding Dutch chip equipment maker ASML and Germany's expertise in research and manufacturing.
Under this initiative, NADI will join forces with its German partner SPRIND to allocate 40 million euros over a 20-month period, funding small teams to use AI technology to accelerate the design of chips used for AI model training and for "inference" — the process of running the models in real-world applications.
Prins noted that while Nvidia's chips are highly powerful, they are not efficient when performing inference tasks. He illustrated the point with a vivid analogy: it is like "driving a truck to go grocery shopping" instead of using a shopping cart.
Across Europe, France established its Defense Innovation Agency in 2018, Germany set up SPRIND in 2019, and the United Kingdom launched ARIA in 2023. France's agency has supported the development of a remote-controlled munition capable of destroying armored targets at distances of up to 50 kilometers, which is now moving through the French military's procurement process.
SPRIND is currently running a 125-million-euro challenge aimed at establishing three European frontier AI laboratories. Jano Costard, who leads the SPRIND challenge, said that in the chip domain, their objective is to achieve an acceleration of the design process by "several orders of magnitude" — a process that currently can take years to complete.
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