On 17 February 2026, the European Commission and EuroHPC JU launched the Frontier AI Grand Challenge. The goal is ambitious: training a frontier AI model with at least 400 billion parameters on European supercomputers. It is the first time Europe has formulated such a challenge at this scale.
The selected project will receive access to up to 2.5% of the total EuroHPC compute capacity for a period of one year. This includes access to the most powerful European supercomputers, including systems specifically configured for large-scale AI training workloads.
The submission deadline is 13 April 2026. Participation is open to European consortia of researchers, companies, and institutions. The expectation is that multiple strong consortia will apply, given the enormous interest previously demonstrated by the 76 expressions of interest for the gigafactories.
This challenge complements the broader AI Continent Action Plan and the Gigafactory plans. It shows that Europe not only wants to build the infrastructure, but also has the ambition to train its own frontier models. Infrastructure without application has little value — the Grand Challenge ensures that the compute capacity is actually deployed for groundbreaking AI research.
The AI Factories Access Calls from EuroHPC provide additional compute capacity for AI workloads. Through these calls, researchers and companies can already gain access to European supercomputers for AI training and inference.
For Sovereign AI-Grid, this underscores the importance of large-scale, sovereign compute capacity. The gigafactories we are building are precisely the infrastructure Europe needs to realise these ambitions. With sites in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, we deliver the federated compute infrastructure required for the next generation of European AI models.
Learn more about our consortium or become a partner.