The Swiss AI Initiative was started in December 2023 and seeded with an initial investment of over 10’000’000 GPU hours. Thanks to the investment of 20m ETH Zurich and EPFL have now created the Swiss National AI Institute (SNAI) to provide a long-term and national perspective on AI-based research, education and innovation. SNAI accelerates the momentum of the Swiss AI Initiative and spearheads research on large-scale AI enabled by Alps. The initiative is further backed by 20 million CHF by ETH Domain, further compute commitments, and third party funding (industry partnerships, donations, etc).
The Swiss AI Initiative is operated by SNAI and the largest open science/open source effort for AI foundation models worldwide. By leveraging its integration with the ETH AI Center and the EPFL AI Center, the initiative benefits from the critical mass of both institutions as well as the expertise of a total of over 800 researchers (incl. 70 AI-focused professors) from over 10 academic institutions across Switzerland.
The scientific leads are responsible for driving progress in their area together with the participating research groups. In total, there are five vertical activities for novel, domain-specific foundation models, and five horizontal activities to advance the foundations of LLMs and large-scale AI models towards trustworthiness and efficiency.
Democratizing large-scale AI for the benefit of society
In addition to its core research activities, the Swiss AI Initiative is distributing 10-20 million GPU hours in 2025 for disruptive research projects through open calls. The Swiss AI Initiative looks for research project that aim to contribute to advances in AI fundamentals or impact applications of AI.
Teams need to have at least one key participant from the ETH domain (or Swiss academic institution for small grants) and aim to create novel open science artifacts that benefit the Swiss, European, or global ecosystem and societal context.
Proposal deadlines & more information
