23rd September (09:00 CET), 2026. Berlin / The Hague: SPRIND, Germany's Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, and NADI, SPRIND's emergent Dutch counterpart, today launch a programme committing €40M to technologists developing radical innovations in pan-European chip design processes.
SPRIND's Challenges model has committed in excess of €100M in 2026 alone to funding high-risk scientific and technological breakthroughs across Europe.
The AI-Native Chip Design Challenge is the latest such deployment, and the first joint-funding initiative between SPRIND and NADI. The programme seeks to compress chip development timeframes from years to weeks, and consequently lift Europe's sovereign AI capabilities.
If Europe wants to compete in the technologies of the future, we cannot afford to innovate country by country. NADI's first programme, launched together with SPRIND on AI-native chip design, shows another way: combining our strengths across borders and turning European excellence into technological leadership.
NADI: Netherlands joins Germany and Sweden in growing European network of innovation funders
NADI, the Dutch National Agency for Disruptive Innovation 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.
SPRIND has been closely involved in NADI's formation process. Like SPRIND, NADI will deploy significant governmental funding to back radical, high-risk innovations across Europe that have the potential for extreme positive benefits to societies and economies.
SPRIND - which was identified by the 2024 Draghi Report 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 joint-run with Vinnova, Sweden's disruptive innovation agency; and has collaborative relationships with ARPAs and the US National Science Foundation. SPRIND is currently consulting further major European economies on the formation of their own counterparts, based also on the SPRIND model.
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. SPRIND has been privileged to be so involved in the formation of NADI, and chips is an ideal sector for the first collaboration between the two agencies. We expect to see more nations commit to backing pan-European, radical breakthroughs. The need is great, and the model works.
Jelle Prins, Co-founder NADI:
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.
European chip independence
Europe currently depends on the U.S. 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 is continually growing in the midst of 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.
In its inaugural cooperative funding Challenge, NADI brings a network of 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.
AI-Native Chip Design: About the programme
SPRIND's Challenges programme comprises competitive, pan-European funding deployments that aim to accelerate radical solutions to major societal problems.
With AI-Native Chip Design, SPRIND and NADI aim to scale the use of AI-driven methods in chip design. For the first time, AI models possess programming capabilities that can draw technical conclusions, while reinforcement learning and AI agents can independently solve complex optimisation problems, allowing AI tools to eventually take on the task of chip design autonomously. The programme will also develop production-ready chip designs that can be used for high-performance AI inference and training, as well as for AI applications - helping to increase energy efficiency, improve scalability, and lower inference costs.
AI-Native Chip Design will run in two stages over 20 months with a funding volume 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 to each receive €7 million in funding. Beyond funding, teams will also receive technical and commercial coaching to ensure their chip designs are market-ready. Exact financing details and dates for Stage 1 to follow.