Pieter Levels on getting blocked from accessing GPUs in EU (xcancel.com)

Indie developer Pieter Levels publicly revealed he was blocked from using the EU’s provisioned GPU resources because access is restricted to a pre‑approved list of organizations tied to the Horizon 2020 program — a funding/administrative registry created in 2014 and closed in 2020. Because new organizations can’t join that legacy list, Levels says he was excluded by default, exposing a surprising bureaucratic gating mechanism for EU GPU access that many modern projects and startups would never satisfy. Technically this is an authorization issue: access to subsidized compute appears to be tied to historical org identifiers rather than an active onboarding pipeline, creating a hardcoded whitelist that prevents legitimate new users. For the AI/ML community the case is significant because it highlights how governance decisions and legacy infrastructure can bottleneck access to scarce compute, harm reproducibility and innovation, and concentrate power in favor of pre-selected entities. The incident underscores the need for transparent, updatable access policies, clearer identity/onboarding flows for public compute programs, and consideration of more flexible or decentralized resource allocation to avoid leaving newcomers locked out.