Cadence Cash Thrive Grant

This is the EuroHPC access mode built specifically for AI workloads, and it is the most direct route for European researchers who need serious compute without a Horizon Europe grant behind them. Allocations are made in node hours across four petascale and pre-exascale systems - LUMI in Finland, Leonardo in Italy, MareNostrum5 in Spain and MeluXina in Luxembourg - for six-month access periods. The stated scope is explicit about modern AI: ethical artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cutting-edge foundation models and generative AI including large language models, which means training and fine-tuning runs are in scope rather than being squeezed into a traditional simulation-oriented HPC framing. Eligibility is deliberately wide. All scientific users qualify whether or not their work is funded by national or European programmes, as do public sector users, and industrial users participating in EU-funded research and innovation projects such as Horizon Europe or the Digital Europe Programme. The one important boundary: industrial users not involved in an EU research project are directed instead to the AI for Industrial Innovation access modes, so a commercial applicant with no EU project affiliation should check which door they are meant to use before drafting. The call operates on rolling cut-offs rather than a single deadline, with 2026 cut-offs at 27 February, 30 April, 30 June, 31 August, 30 October and 11 December, each at 10:00 CET. That cadence means an unsuccessful application can be revised and resubmitted roughly two months later, and a team that misses one window is never waiting long for the next. As with all compute schemes, no money is awarded - staff and data costs must come from elsewhere.