Summary
The Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL) is a new EU funding programme focused on bringing digital technology to businesses, citizens, and public administrations. How to make Europe greener and more digital are the twin challenges for our generation, and our success in meeting them will define our future.
The European Commission has begun to look at a greener Europe through the lens of the European Green Deal. At the same time, it is opening up discussions about the move to a more digital world: the digital transition.
Digital technology and infrastructure have a critical role in our private lives and business environments. We rely on them to communicate, work, advance science and answer current environmental problems. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted not only how much we rely on our technology to be available to us, but also how important it is for Europe not to be dependent on systems and solutions coming from other regions of the world. Paving the way for achieving this goal is DIGITAL programme.
The Digital Europe Programme will provide strategic funding to answer these challenges, supporting projects in five key capacity areas: in supercomputing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced digital skills, and ensuring a wide use of digital technologies across the economy and society, including through Digital Innovation Hubs. With a planned overall budget of €7.5 billion (in current prices), it aims to accelerate the economic recovery and shape the digital transformation of Europe’s society and economy, bringing benefits to everyone, but in particular to small and medium-sized enterprises.
The Digital Europe Programme will not address these challenges in isolation, but rather complement the funding available through other EU programmes, such as the Horizon Europe programme for research and innovation and the Connecting Europe Facility for digital infrastructure, the Recovery and Resilience Facility and the Structural funds, to name a few. It is a part of the next long-term EU budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021-2027.
Scope
The first four work programmes implementing DIGITAL are:
- DIGITAL Europe - Work Programme (excluding the topics below)
- DIGITAL Europe - EDIH European Digital Innovation Hubs
- DIGITAL Europe - Cybersecurity
- DIGITAL Europe - High Performance Computing
Domains
Still tbd after calls
Partners
- The first three work programmes were adopted by the European Commission and follow extensive consultations with the Member States
- The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is a joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private partners to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe.