Nebius expands its AI Builder Program across Europe with $10 million in compute grants, investor connections and hackathons
The AI Builder Program is expanding across Europe with $10M in total support across compute grants, capital, and community programs. Are you building open models, developer tools, or applications on top of them? The program helps builders go from experimentation to scale-up through: - Compute grants for selected projects in areas such as open models, coding agents, post-training, and evals - VC connections to help turn open source projects into companies - Hackathons and demo days with communities including @AITinkerers, @techeurope_ , and @esra_robotics to build, connect, and share your work We鈥檙e kicking off the European expansion this week at #NVIDIAGTC Berlin with @NVIDIAAI, @Accel, and a network of European VCs. Building AI in Europe? Details below. 馃憞
Context
Free compute and investor introductions could help European open source AI projects grow into companies.
This is a company announcement from Nebius, a European headquartered AI cloud provider, made with NVIDIA and the venture firm Accel. Nebius says it launched the program globally in September, and grants are awarded at its discretion.
Deep dive
On October 19, Nebius posted that its AI Builder Program is expanding across Europe with $10 million in total support across compute grants, capital and community programs.
The post said the program offers compute grants for selected projects in areas such as open models, coding agents, post training and evaluations, connections to venture capital firms to turn open source projects into companies, and hackathons and demo days with communities including AI Tinkerers, Tech Europe and ESRA, the European Student Robotics Association. Nebius said it would kick off the expansion this week at NVIDIA's GTC conference in Berlin, with NVIDIA, Accel and other European venture firms.
Nebius's blog post says it is looking for work created in Europe that strengthens open source AI, including open weight research, agent runtimes, inference tooling and reinforcement learning. It quotes Matt Weigand, a partner at Accel, saying the firm believes open source plays a critical role in AI. The blog says thousands applied to join within weeks of the September launch.
The program's site says basic membership is free and includes small credits from Nebius and partners such as LangSmith and Tavily, while compute grants are subject to review and availability. Nebius did not say how the $10 million is split between grants, capital and events. The video shows the program's headings and a speaker at a builder event, ending with Nebius and NVIDIA logos.
What to expect next
Watch which projects win compute grants and whether Accel or other firms invest in program members, which would show whether the program creates companies.
Also watch how Nebius's push competes with European efforts from other cloud providers and governments to support local AI builders.
Nebius said the expansion starts this week at GTC Berlin, so the first hackathons, demo days and grant announcements may follow soon. Details on how much of the $10 million goes to each part of the program are still to come.