Equal Opportunity Notice

The BSC AI Factory Accelerator Programme is Spain's national acceleration programme for AI startups, run by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center with NVIDIA and AWS as technology partners. Each edition takes 100 startups, 25 at each of four launchpads in Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid and Málaga. The hybrid programme runs 14 weeks in three stages: INSPIRE (business fundamentals), HANDS ON (supercomputing access) and SCALE (investment readiness and a Demo Day). Up to 50 startups move on to HANDS ON and 12 to SCALE. Participants get 1:1 business mentoring for CEOs, technical mentoring for CTOs, and training in advanced AI model training, optimization and distributed systems. The best-performing teams get hands-on access to the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, with support from BSC AI experts. The programme is fully funded and takes no equity. Applications opened 13 October and close 9 November 2026, with kick-off in Barcelona on 2 December and a Demo Day in Madrid on 17 March.

Innovate UK is investing up to £3.1 million in Phase 1 of Frontier AI: SME Champions, the first of three phases. UK SMEs working alone can apply for feasibility or industrial research projects with total eligible costs of £150,000-£250,000, funded at up to 70% for micro and small firms, 60% for medium firms and 50% for large firms. AI must be the core technical contribution, starting at TRL 1-3. Each project picks one theme and a priority within it: AI-enabled health and life sciences, advanced materials with AI, secure AI for national security and defence, or AI safety and assurance technologies. Projects deliver a proof-of-concept prototype and a technical whitepaper, with a clear route to defensible IP. Hardware-led projects, literature reviews, routine integration of existing tools and fully autonomous targeting are excluded. Projects run 1-3 months, start by 1 April 2027 and end by 30 June 2027. Only Phase 1 winners can apply for Phase 2, which is expected to fund demonstrators of up to £1 million over up to 12 months, subject to business case approval. Innovate UK estimates a success rate of about 2%. The competition opened 1 October 2026 and closes 11 November 2026 at 11:00am UK time.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking launched its AI Gigafactories call on 30 July 2026 as a joint procurement, not a conventional research grant, and that distinction shapes who should respond. It seeks consortia or Special Purpose Vehicles bringing together companies, public entities, investors and other partners to establish up to seven AI Gigafactories across Europe - facilities that combine massive computing power and state-of-the-art AI processors with the software and cloud technology stacks, high-bandwidth connectivity and energy-efficient data centres needed to deliver frontier AI training, fine-tuning and inference at scale. This is the tier above the 19 AI Factories and 13 AI Factory Antennas EuroHPC already oversees, which serve SMEs and startups with free customised support; the Gigafactories are aimed at frontier-scale sovereign capacity. The financing model is blended: EuroHPC expects total private investment of more than EUR 20,000,000,000 across the EU, with successful projects receiving varying levels of EU and national co-funding calibrated to the size and range of sovereign services offered. Per-facility EU contributions have deliberately not been published, so applicants must build their own capital stack and negotiate co-funding rather than apply against a fixed grant envelope. Facilities may be established in a single Member State or span several, and cross-border developments are explicitly welcomed. The reference is EUROHPC-2026-CEI-AIGF-01 and the deadline is 12 November 2026 at 16:00 CET. Realistically this is a call for infrastructure-grade consortia with credible access to billions in capital, energy siting and hyperscale operations experience - not for individual research groups or early-stage startups, who should instead route through the existing AI Factories network.