The European Commission has selected the EUROPA consortium, led by Italian company Domyn, as the winner of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge, a flagship EU initiative aimed at strengthening Europe’s sovereign AI capabilities.

The project will develop an open-source frontier AI model designed to operate across all 24 official EU languages, with a target scale of over 400 billion parameters, placing it in the category of next-generation, state-of-the-art global AI systems.

The initiative is intended to reinforce Europe’s strategic autonomy in artificial intelligence, enabling the development of advanced AI systems on European infrastructure while ensuring broad accessibility for businesses, researchers, public administrations and digital service providers.

According to the European Commission, the EUROPA model will be:

• Fully open-source

• Multilingual across all EU languages

• Designed to match leading global AI performance standards

• Focused on broad adoption across Europe’s digital ecosystem

The Commission highlights that the project demonstrates Europe’s capacity to build advanced AI systems internally, leveraging regional talent, infrastructure and industrial capabilities. It also aims to improve access to frontier AI technologies across the EU’s linguistic and regulatory environment.

EU leadership emphasized that the initiative is part of a broader strategy to ensure that AI development in Europe remains aligned with openness, trust, and regulatory values, while enhancing competitiveness in the global AI landscape.