EUROPA wins EU challenge to build open-source frontier AI model

The European Commission has selected EUROPA, a European consortium led by Italian company Domyn, as the winner of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge. The project will develop an open-source AI model covering all 24 official EU languages.

The Commission said the selection is intended to strengthen Europe’s ability to develop advanced AI using its own infrastructure. EUROPA’s model is expected to be openly available and designed to operate at the forefront of global AI capabilities, with the goal of making advanced AI more accessible to businesses, researchers and public institutions across Europe’s linguistic diversity.

Launched in February 2026, the Frontier AI Grand Challenge asked European AI innovators to propose a model with more than 400 billion parameters, a scale associated with the world’s most advanced AI systems. Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said EUROPA would show Europe can match leading systems while emphasizing openness, trust and strategic autonomy.