The European Parliament and the Council reached an agreement on the new Digital Europe programme for capacity building and market uptake of digital technologies.
The Digital Europe programme (DEP) is a new programme, which was proposed by the European Commission on 6 June 2018. It should foster capacity building in the fields of high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity and increase market uptake of the technologies and address the current skills gap across Europe.
The inter-institutional negotiations could advance fast as there were no major disagreements on the programme and thus already after the first and single trilogue meeting on 13 February a compromise was agreed. The Council document preparing for the trilogue allows taking a first look at the changes agreed on at technical level.
The final compromise reached contains some changes compared to the original proposal. First, the EP and the Council strengthened the role of distributed ledger technologies throughout the programme and included blockchain among the technologies whose uptake shall be supported. Then the application of digital technologies in the transport and mobility sector also gained weight significantly as the Council was pushing for a more prominent role of e.g. cooperative, connected and automated mobility. The Council also pushed for stronger synergies with skills-related programmes beyond Erasmus+, while not specifying further how the delineation between the programmes shall look like in practice. In addition, the Advanced Digital Skills pillar shall be implemented exclusively through direct management. Finally, the article describing cooperation and association modalities of third countries has not been included in the final compromise and will be discussed later, once the long-term budget of the EU and the outcome of the Brexit have become clearer. Nevertheless, the proposal of the EC and the compromise text of the EP include some potential restrictions to third country cooperation. For example, entities located in third countries could be excluded from certain actions under the first three specific objectives, comprising HPC, AI and cybersecurity.
In addition, the budget of the programme is not yet certain. The EC proposed a total envelope of €9.2 billion, whereas the EP did not ask for any budget increase. The Council has not yet uttered its position on the budget of single programmes, whereas some Member States, e.g. Sweden and the Netherlands, have called for a slim overall EU budget ahead and after the EC’s proposal of the next multiannual financial framework.
Meanwhile, the partnerships linked to Horizon Europe and DEP are advancing. The EP voted on the new Cybersecurity Competence Centre in the Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committee (see SwissCore article). In addition, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) welcomes Sweden as a new member and launched its first call for expression of interest for hosting entities, both for petascale supercomputers and for the precursors to exascale supercomputers. The financial contribution of the EU could add up to roughly €30 million for the acquisition of at least two petascale supercomputers covering up to 35% of the acquisition cost. For at least two precursors to exascale supercomputers, the EU budget contribution could totally amount to €250 million funding up to 50% of the acquisition cost and the operating cost of the supercomputers. The hosting entities need to be at least partially located in Member States, which puts further constraints on non-EU countries like Norway that joined the JU. Switzerland has signed the EuroHPC declaration but is not yet a member of the JU.