By Egle Markeviciute, EU Tech Loop with Euronews
Published on
The EU has recently announced three new AI projects — Floods and droughts, Eunomia.AI and EuropAI — that aim to support the uptake of Generative AI in public administrations across the EU.
The total funding for the projects comes to €36.8 million, of which €18.4 million is provided directly by the EU. The final outcomes of these projects are expected by 2029-2030.
While testing and scaling GenAI solutions across EU member states does indeed require flexibility, the future influx of funding for GenAI and ApplyAI solutions in the EU must come with strict oversight and increased participation by European private-sector players with real-world experience building GenAI solutions.
In the past, bureaucracy and Kafkaesque paperwork often prevented fast-moving startups and scaleups from participating in both EU and national public tenders and funding programs.
However, the oversight of where and how the EU funding should be directed will increasingly be necessary to prevent a new wave of “AI-washing” — echoing the “innovation-washing” of the past, where EU funding sometimes did not translate into measurable impact.
Floods and droughts project
The “Floods and droughts” consortium is led by Italy and co-developed by stakeholders from France, Spain and Greece.
The project’s total value is €8.8 million, with €4.4 millions provided by the EU. The project is expected to end by 30 June 2030.
The consortium aims to provide public administrations with Gen-AI-enabled tools that improve anticipation, crisis management and citizen communication related to increasingly common climate disasters such as floods and droughts.
Eunomia AI project
The “Eunomia AI” consortium is led by Spain and joined by 13 more EEA countries: Austria, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Norway and Malta.
The project’s total value is €13.9 million, with €6.9 million provided by the EU. The project is expected to end by 30 June 2029, with the first pilot projects expected in one and a half years.
The goals of the project are twofold: first, accelerate the adoption of trustworthy GenAI in European public administrations by deploying it in 25 public administrations and at least 15 public services. Second, reinforce the European tech sovereignty by using and fine-tuning the EU’s open-source models.
The project description states that this will be achieved by procuring and hosting “centralized, high-performance GenAI infrastructure” at the University of Granada, with an option to create federated local nodes.
EuropAI project
The third project, “EuropAI,” is led by the Netherlands and includes Denmark, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The project’s total cost sits at €13.9 million, with €6.9 million provided by EU funding. The estimated project date is on 30 June 2029.
The goals of this consortium are to accelerate the adoption of sovereign and trustworthy GenAI solutions across European governments by creating a framework for EU member state governments to co-create, test, and share GenAI solutions in three strategic domains: legislative & administrative simplification, urban analysis and spatial planning, and digital assistance for citizens across web and mobile.
The consortium describes its own project through a lens of a kitchen.
“European public administrations currently rely on imported ‘AI fast food’ from non-EU providers, like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini — expensive, opaque solutions misaligned with European sovereignty and compliance requirements”.
The plan, EuropAI’s team says, is to offer member states a trusted “community kitchen where Member States co-create, test, and share GenAI solutions”.
The system’s backbone, comparable to a professional kitchen’s equipment, is built on Denmark’s OS2ai platform, which already serves more than 28,000 employees, and the Netherlands’ GovChat-NL.
On top of that sit ready-made tools that have already been piloted and validated, described as “pre-cooked meals ready to serve,” along with reusable building blocks such as European-made AI models, blueprints that let other countries replicate what works, compliance checks that act as “nutrition labels,” and an app marketplace serving as “an organised pantry”.
This story was originally published on EU Tech Loop and has been shared on Euronews as part of a syndication agreement.