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.
The objective is to pool resources across leading academic institutions. To facilitate research on frontier AI foundation models, we are holding regular calls that are also open to researchers in Europe and beyond. For 2026, the 10-20 million GPU hours should be distributed. The large compute call – targeted at projects requesting more than 500k GPU hours – is held twice a year. Applications for small compute grants are continuously accepted.
Projects funded under this call will have a duration of one year.
Interested applicants should note the following deadlines:
Comprehensive guidelines, templates, and submission details are available in the Application Toolkit.
For any questions or clarifications related to large projects, contact large-grants@swiss-ai.org.
In line with the above goals, the Swiss AI Initiative provides funding to support the research and development of open science artifacts in core areas of foundation model development, as well as target application areas of critical societal importance.
Small project grants are allocated for a period of six months, and provide access to the CSCS Alps infrastructure and compute resources for AI projects that require large-scale training, evaluation, and deployment capabilities to be realized.
(~50k GPU hours): rolling reviews.
