Commission selects EUROPA consortium as the winner of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge

What happened

On June 19, 2026 the European Commission picked the EUROPA consortium (led by Italy's Domyn) as winner of its Frontier AI Grand Challenge. The consortium gets EuroHPC supercomputer time to build an open frontier model for the entire EU.

Context and impact

This is the EU's most concrete step toward its own frontier AI – a response to US dominance (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and to the Anthropic Mythos export-control fight. An open, multilingual model is meant to cut public-sector, research and corporate dependence on closed US models.

Details

• Winning consortium: EUROPA, led by Domyn (Italy).
• Goal: open-source model with 400B+ parameters.
• Coverage: all 24 official EU languages.
• Hardware: up to 2.5% of total EuroHPC capacity for a year.
• The challenge was launched in February 2026.