Dare (Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe) (dare-riscv.eu)

DARE (Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe) — SGA1 — has secured funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 101202459, supported by the EU’s Horizon Europe programme and a consortium of member states including Spain, Germany, Czechia, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Croatia, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, France and Austria. The announcement formalizes pan‑European backing for a project focused on RISC‑V as a foundation for digital autonomy in high‑performance computing; funding comes with the usual disclaimer that the views expressed are those of the authors alone. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it signals institutional investment in an open ISA path toward hardware and software sovereignty—an effort likely to accelerate RISC‑V adoption for HPC and AI workloads. Technically, the project could catalyze work on high‑performance RISC‑V cores, vector/accelerator extensions (e.g., RVV and custom ISA extensions), compiler/runtime/toolchain maturation, and co‑design of accelerators optimized for ML kernels. The broader implications include reduced vendor lock‑in, greater scope for custom AI accelerators tuned to European use cases, and a strengthened ecosystem for reproducible, verifiable hardware and software stacks in AI research and deployment.