SPRIND opens applications for €125M competition

This article was published on April 30, 2026 The Next Frontier AI Challenge, announced at EurIPS in December, explicitly tells applicants not to try to catch up with OpenAI, but to leapfrog to the next architectural S-curve, with up to €1 billion in follow-on funding dangled for the three winning labs. SPRIND, Germany’s federal agency for breakthrough innovation, opened applications today for its Next Frontier AI Challenge, a €125 million, 24-month structured competition to identify and build up to three European frontier AI labs from scratch. The application window runs until 1 June 2026, with jury pitches scheduled for 24–25 June and the first ten funded teams beginning work in July. The challenge was announced at EurIPS in Copenhagen on 3 December 2025, a European conference officially endorsed by NeurIPS, the most prestigious AI research conference globally. Its premise is unambiguous about Europe’s current position. “Europe’s competitiveness in AI innovation remains far behind that of the USA and China,” the challenge brief states. “Without training its own models, Europe risks deepening its strategic dependence on these technologies.” The goal is not to close that gap on the