Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL)

Digital Transformation

The Digital Europe Programme is a new EU funding programme focused on bringing digital technology to businesses, citizens and public administrations.

With a planned overall budget of €7.5 billion, this programme aims to accelerate the economic recovery and shape the digital transformation of Europe’s society and economy, bringing benefits to everyone, but in particular to small and medium-sized enterprises.

The Digital Europe Programme shall be supporting projects in five key capacity areas: 

• supercomputing;
   
• artificial intelligence;
   
• cybersecurity;
   
• advanced digital skills;
   
• ensuring a wide use of digital technologies across the economy and society, including through Digital Innovation Hubs.

The Digital Europe Programme will not address these challenges in isolation, but rather complement the funding available through other EU programmes, such as the Horizon Europe programme for research and innovation and the Connecting Europe Facility for digital infrastructure, the Recovery and Resilience Facility and the Structural funds, to name a few.

The programme is designed to fill the gap between research and deployment of digital technologies. It will bring the results of research to the market for the benefit of Europe's citizens and businesses, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises SMEs). The Digital Europe Programme will:

• help the EU achieve a high common level of cybersecurity;
   
• open up the use of artificial intelligence by businesses and public administrations;
   
• fund the design and delivery of specialised programmes and traineeships;
   
• build up and strengthen the EU’s supercomputing and data processing capacities;
   
• finance European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) which will function as one-stop shops that help companies dynamically respond to the digital challenges and become more competitive.

The financing mechanism applied under the Digital Europe Programme provides grants that cover a percentage of eligible costs, sometimes up to 100% under certain funding strands.

The Digital Europe Programme is open to a number of organisations, mainly companies and public entities, depending on the funding strand.