September 2021

New EU Funding Programme Bringing Digital Technology to Businesses and the Public

The European Commission has begun to look at a greener Europe through the lens of the European Green Deal. At the same time, it is opening up discussions about the move to a more digital world: the digital transition.

Digital technology and infrastructure have a critical role in our private lives and business environments. We rely on them to communicate, work, advance science and answer current environmental problems. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted not only how much we rely on our technology to be available to us, but also how important it is for Europe not to be dependent on systems and solutions coming from other regions of the world. Paving the way for achieving this goal is DIGITAL programme.

With a planned overall budget of €7.5 billion (in current prices), it aims to strengthen investments in a range of areas, such as:

• supercomputing and data processing capacities;
• core artificial intelligence (AI) capacities such as a data spaces and libraries of AI algorithms;  
• cybersecurity;
• digital skills, expanding the best use of digital capacity in EU’s society and economy;
• support to the digitalisation of businesses and public administrations

The Digital Europe 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 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. It is a part of the next long-term EU budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021-2027.