Illustration of a computer chip on a circuit board Credit: via Canva The Netherlands’ newest government agency is now one month old and has already made its first move by deciding to use AI in the design of the chips that power AI. On Wednesday, the National Agency for Disruptive Innovation (NADI) and Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND) announced that they would commit €40 million over 20 months to small teams aiming to speed up chip design, Reuters reported. The Chip Design Challenge organized by SPRIND has two stages and is aimed at the design of chips for both training and inference, which is the running of trained models. The objective is to reduce development cycles from years to weeks, a goal which Jano Costard, head of challenges at SPRIND, described as “several orders of magnitude acceleration”.
Jelle Prins, one of NADI’s co-founders, argued against the current company. According to him, Nvidia chips may be powerful but are inefficient for inference, likening it to “doing your shopping with a truck”. NADI has received €500 million this month from the Dutch government; it is modeled on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. SPRIND, established in 2019, advised the Dutch government on the design of NADI, and the chip challenge is the first joint funding program between the two organizations.
The challenge comes after SPRIND’s first joint initiative with Sweden’s Vinnova earlier this year, and also follows its separate €125 million challenge to establish three European frontier AI labs. The reason for the pairing is geographic: the Netherlands provides the chipmaking ecosystem associated with ASML, while Germany contributes research and manufacturing expertise. Together, the two countries are involved in a broader European initiative to reduce dependence on American technology. “We expect to see more nations commit to backing pan-European, radical breakthroughs,” Costard said in the announcement. A sum of forty million euros won’t be enough to create a competitor to Nvidia; rather, the bet is that the slower stage in chipmaking, namely the design phase, is the area in which Europe can make the most progress.
