Grants

The grant aims to support projects developing advanced and innovative XR hardware, including headsets, screens, wearables, haptic components, sensors, actuators, and advanced chips to enable deeper and more lifelike immersion in virtual worlds, engaging all human senses. The goal is to develop next-generation XR equipment and solutions—such as wearable and haptic devices, non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, and interoperable miniaturised hardware and technologies—that place users at the centre of highly realistic virtual experiences. Projects should explore new scientific approaches or extend current ones to better synchronise different sensory modalities and integrate these components into fully functional and tested devices, demonstrating their utility in industrial and social contexts. Key priorities include inclusivity, energy efficiency, reliability, and interoperability, with strong involvement from Social Sciences and Humanities to maximise societal impact. Projects are expected to leverage and contribute to open standards and ongoing standardisation efforts.

The EU Frontier AI Initiative supports the development of sovereign, safe-by-design frontier AI models with improved computational efficiency. The programme aims to bolster the EU’s AI research capacity and achieve excellence in European frontier model development. Supported projects should advance state-of-the-art multimodal frontier AI with agentic capabilities, optimise for energy and computational efficiency, and integrate comprehensive safety methodologies, including alignment, adversarial robustness, interpretability, and risk mitigation in agentic frameworks. Projects are expected to collaborate widely with the European AI community, build on previous research, and share results within the European R&D ecosystem. Strong links with RAISE, AI Factories, Data Labs, and other EU AI partnerships are required.

The grant supports international cooperation for the faster uptake, testing, and deployment of tailored Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions in low- and middle-income countries, mainly by empowering local innovation hubs. The aim is to strengthen local innovation ecosystems that foster sustainable socio-economic impact in areas such as education, healthcare, agriculture, and environmental sustainability. Activities include system prototyping, validation, and demonstration in operational environments, particularly aligned with EU digital initiatives and strategies such as the International Digital Strategy for the EU and the AI Continent Action Plan. The programme prioritizes local data, co-creation through Living Labs, adaptation and transfer of AI developed in Europe, and large-scale deployment and validation of these solutions to contribute to global sustainable development goals, including climate, agriculture, biodiversity, health, education, and humanitarian needs.

This grant funds pilots for new technologies and a demonstration site to promote energy-efficient and sustainable AI data processing in data centres. The objective is to reinforce EU strategic autonomy and contribute to climate goals through innovation in cooling technologies, backup power systems, data centre optimisation for AI workloads, and integration of renewables and waste heat reuse.

The co-programmed European Partnership for Virtual Worlds aims to develop and promote a thriving industrial and end-user ecosystem in the EU, covering all aspects of the virtual worlds value chain. It seeks to actively engage with industrial and societal sectors, providing access to a broad range of resources, including funding, expertise, and technology. The action is expected to support the development and strengthening of the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for Virtual Worlds in Europe, promote the adoption and acceptance of Virtual Worlds technologies, foster standardisation, and reinforce links between related initiatives at EU, national, and regional levels.

The Challenge-Driven AI Innovation Booster supports significant technological progress and innovation in priority sectors as identified by the EU Apply AI Strategy. Through large-scale, multi-stage challenge competitions, the action promotes the adoption and development of advanced, trustworthy AI solutions in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and in-vehicle autonomous driving. Each supported project will organize competitions to address impactful use-cases, fostering collaboration between AI developers, SMEs, research organizations, and user-industry enterprises, contributing to the competitiveness and visibility of the European AI ecosystem.

This grant aims to fund demand-side driven pilot projects that validate open orchestration platforms across the telco-cloud edge continuum, enabling the transformative value of AI for European businesses and supporting sustainability and competitiveness in key EU industries. The pilots will develop, integrate, and demonstrate advanced 3C (Connected, Collaborative, Computing) networks, leveraging open APIs, open-source components, and advanced features such as security, mobility, and low latency. A major focus is on real-world sector relevance—particularly in smart mobility, automotive, energy, smart communities, industrial virtual worlds, health, agrifood, or manufacturing—with pilots featuring practical deployment of AI, virtual worlds, data governance, and privacy. Consortia must include both demand (users) and supply (infrastructure) partners and provide robust data sharing and security models aligned with EU initiatives like Gaia-X. The call encourages SME, start-up, and scale-up participation, with solutions to be leveraged in both public and private sectors.

The Apply AI Strategy focuses on accelerating the transition from research to deployment of AI-powered robotics in industry. Projects funded under this topic will deliver common frameworks and reusable building blocks to support multiple sectors, helping Europe scale up AI-driven robotics. Expected outcomes include wider and faster deployment of robotics, improved integration frameworks, and validation in key use cases. The initiative aims to improve the competitiveness of European industries, especially SMEs, through advanced robotics, AI innovations, and modular, interoperable system integration solutions.

This grant aims to empower and financially support European stakeholders—especially from SMEs, R&I institutions, Open-Source communities, academia, and societal actors—to actively participate in the global development of digital standards. The objective is to increase European influence in digital standardisation, improve the skills of European experts, perform gap analyses, provide foresight on emerging technologies, and promote awareness of digital standardisation's competitive advantages. It contributes to the implementation of the EU Standardisation Strategy and related policy initiatives, supporting EU values, competitiveness, and tech sovereignty on the international stage.