The European Commission has selected the EUROPA consortium as the winner of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge. The consortium, led by the Italian start-up Domyn in collaboration with the German Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, will use European supercomputer infrastructure to build an advanced, open-source artificial intelligence model.

The key players: the challenge, the consortium and Domyn

The Frontier AI Grand Challenge is a competition launched by the European Commission in February 2026 — as part of the Apply AI strategy and the broader AI Continent Action Plan — to fund a single, large-scale ‘frontier’ artificial intelligence project. Organised through the European AI-BOOST project and in collaboration with EuroHPC JU, the competition asked participants to propose a model with over 400 billion parameters, guaranteeing the winner access to up to 2.5 per cent of Europe’s supercomputing capacity for one year.

The EUROPA consortium is the European alliance that emerged as the sole winner of the challenge, led by the Italian start-up Domyn. The aim is to build an advanced, open-source AI model capable of covering all 24 official languages of the European Union: a technology conceived as a European common good, freely available to businesses, researchers and public institutions, rather than as a proprietary product of a single company or nation.

Domyn is the Italian scale-up leading the consortium, founded and led by CEO Uljan Sharka. Originally known as iGenius and rebranded in 2025, it specialises in sovereign AI for businesses and regulated sectors: it has already released the open-source ‘Italia’ model and built the Colosseum supercomputer, in partnership with NVIDIA, to train models on a large scale. This profile makes it the natural leader of a European, open and independent AI project.

The founding principles of the project

The strategic plan sets out unique features for the European Union’s digital autonomy, including being open-source and providing native support for linguistic diversity. The model, in fact, rests on two pillars:

• Full Accessibility: the model will be released as open-source software. It will enable small and medium-sized enterprises, researchers and hospitals to integrate AI into the fields of industrial manufacturing, healthcare and autonomous systems without having to pay for expensive foreign licences.

• Linguistic Diversity: unlike current models, which perform best only in English, this tool will be developed as a native, bilingual or multilingual solution for all 24 official languages of the European Union, whilst complying with European privacy and copyright laws.

💻 Immense Computing Power

The project aims to exceed 400 billion parameters, a scale that places this artificial intelligence on a par with the world’s most advanced systems. To give an idea of the scale, the French company Mistral, the other major European player, envisages an architecture comprising a total of 675 billion parameters for its flagship model, Mistral Large 3.

For training purposes, the consortium will have access to up to 2.5 per cent of the total computing capacity of the supercomputer network managed by EuroHPC JU, the European Union initiative that combines public and private funding to build and operate Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.

🇪🇺 Sovereignty and Digital Democracy

Unusually, the initiative is not designed to reward a single country or to promote a private monopoly. It is a collective investment aimed at safeguarding European digital sovereignty.

Releasing the code as open-source will enable companies, researchers and public institutions across Europe to use, study and improve this technology freely, securely and transparently.

Europe on its own terms

The initiative is part of a wider plan known as the AI Continent Action Plan, which aims to demonstrate that Europe has the talent, public infrastructure and industrial capacity to avoid dependence on foreign private companies. Until now, Europe’s sole flagship AI system had been the French Mistral. From now on, European AI is set to think – and speak – in 24 languages.