Domyn's EUROPA Plan: How Europe Plans to Build a 400B-Parameter Open-Source Frontier AI Model Within a Year

On June 19, 2026, the European Commission selected the EUROPA consortium, led by Italian AI company Domyn, as the winner of its Frontier AI Grand Challenge — a competition launched in February 2026 . The prize is not cash but a mandate: develop and release a fully open-source frontier AI model covering all 24 official EU languages, trained from scratch on European supercomputing infrastructure . Domyn CEO Uljan Sharka stated the model will be unveiled within the next year .

The consortium includes Domyn and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft research lab .

Model Specifications

• Parameters: Over 400 billion parameters .
• Languages: All 24 official EU languages .
• Training: Trained from scratch (not a fine-tune of an existing model) .
• License: Fully open-source and openly available .

Funding & Investors

Domyn is backed by a mix of strategic and institutional investors:

• G42 (Abu Dhabi) — a core backer disclosed across multiple reports .
• Eurizon Capital — Italian asset manager that took a 2.6% stake as part of a near-€1 billion funding round .
• Rabobank (via Rabo Investments Corporate Venturing) — made a minority equity investment announced April 20, 2026 .
• BNY Mellon (Bank of New York Mellon) — made a strategic investment alongside Rabobank, announced April 20, 2026 .

Domyn declined to disclose exact round sizes but has stated it is targeting approximately €1 billion in total funding over six months and plans to spend $10 billion over three years building one of Europe's largest AI infrastructures .

Compute Resources

6,000-chip Nvidia Blackwell cluster — Domyn has a 6,000-chip Nvidia Blackwell cluster already in development, giving the project committed private compute before training begins .

EuroHPC supercomputing access — As the challenge prize, EUROPA receives free access to up to 2.5% of total EuroHPC (European High-Performance Computing) supercomputer capacity for one year, making this publicly backed training infrastructure with real delivery expectations .

NVIDIA also announced on June 19, 2026 that it is working with European nations and industry leaders — including Domyn — to build NVIDIA Blackwell AI infrastructure aimed at strengthening digital sovereignty .

Strategic Significance for European AI Autonomy

• Sovereign AI infrastructure: The model is explicitly designed as a European sovereign alternative to US and Chinese frontier models, trained on EU infrastructure and open-sourced so European companies and governments retain ownership and control .
• Shift from regulation to building: The Commission framed this as a landmark test of whether Europe can move from being a regulator of AI to a builder of frontier-scale AI .
• Multilingual inclusivity: Covering all 24 official EU languages addresses a key gap — most large models underperform on smaller European languages .
• Regulated-industry focus: Domyn specializes in "Responsible AI" for regulated sectors (finance, public admin, heavy industry), giving the model a built-in commercial pathway to European enterprises that cannot rely on non-EU cloud AI .