German and Dutch strategic innovation agencies to collaborate on AI chip design

By Toby Sterling

AMSTERDAM/BERLIN, Sept 23 (Reuters) - A Dutch government agency set up to foster strategic innovation will work with its German counterpart to pursue breakthroughs in AI computer chip design, Prime Minister Rob Jetten said on Wednesday, as part of European efforts to curb reliance on US expertise.

The National Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or NADI for short, was launched this month with €500 million ($570 million) of government money as a Dutch equivalent of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Popularly known as DARPA, that agency was set up in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union's Sputnik launch and played a role in the technologies that led to the internet, stealth aircraft and GPS.

DRAWING ON ASML ECOSYSTEM

Jetten has thrown his weight behind NADI, one of the flagship projects of a competitiveness taskforce he set up after taking office in February. He said cross-border cooperation makes sense as Europe "cannot afford to innovate country by country" if it wants to compete.

NADI co-founder Jelle Prins said chips were a natural focus given the strong semiconductor ecosystem around Dutch equipment maker ASML and German research and manufacturing strengths.

In the project, NADI and German counterpart, SPRIND, will commit €40 million over 20 months to groups of small teams using AI to accelerate the design of chips for training and "inference", or running, AI models.

Prins said NVIDIA chips are powerful but inefficient for inference tasks, comparing them to "doing your shopping with a truck" rather than a grocery cart.

In Europe, France established its defence innovation agency AID in 2018, Germany set up SPRIND in 2019 and Britain launched ARIA in 2023. 

SPRIND’s head of challenges, Jano Costard, told Reuters the goal with chips was to achieve “several orders of magnitude acceleration” in a design process that currently takes years. 

($1 = 0.8731 euros)

(Reporting by Toby Sterling; editing by Barbara Lewis)