40 million euros for small design teams
NADI, the National Agency for Disruptive Innovation, was set up this month with 500 million euros of government money. Together with Germany's SPRIND, it is committing 40 million euros over 20 months to small teams that use AI to accelerate the design of chips for training and for inference, the work of running a model.[1]
NADI co-founder Jelle Prins said NVIDIA chips are inefficient for inference and compared that use to shopping with a truck. That is his analogy, not a measured workload. Jano Costard, who leads challenges at SPRIND, described the goal as several orders of magnitude of acceleration in a design process that takes years. Prins tied the partnership to the ASML equipment ecosystem in the Netherlands and to German research and manufacturing.[1]
Three sums, one chip job
The sum tied to chip design is 40 million euros over 20 months. SPRIND's separate 125 million euro challenge aims at three European frontier-AI labs. The 500 million euros NADI received when it was set up this month is the agency's own purse.[1]
Put the figures on one denominator. The money written against the chip job is 40 million euros over 20 months. The 500 million euros is the agency's founding sum. Costard described the design process in years, and several orders of magnitude of acceleration stands as the goal.[1]
Marks a reader can check
The public parts of the 40 million euro commitment are the small teams and the design process Costard described in years. A later note that names those teams, or that reports the process in a shorter span than those years, changes the mark between the budget and a chip that has entered production.[1]