Frontier AI Grand Challenge: Domyn to lead the sovereign AI project
The European Commission has awarded the Frontier AI Grand Challenge to the consortium led by the Milan-based scale-up. It is not just about technology: it is a geopolitical decision
The European Commission has chosen an Italian company to help shape its future in artificial intelligence. The company is Domyn, formerly known as iGenius, led by Uljan Sharka, born in 1992, an Italian citizen of Albanian origin. The Milan-based scale-up will be the organisation tasked with leading ‘Europa’, the European consortium set up specifically to implement the Frontier AI Grand Challenge: the creation of a model with over 400 billion parameters, a scale that places the project amongst the most advanced artificial intelligence systems in the world. In this context, the proposal led by the Italian company was deemed the most convincing in terms of strategic vision, execution capability and potential impact.
Who is Domyn
Founded with the aim of developing artificial intelligence solutions for mission-critical applications in regulated sectors, Domyn focuses on so-called ‘sovereign AI’: an approach that enables organisations to retain control over models, data and infrastructure, reducing dependence on major cloud providers and ensuring privacy, traceability and regulatory compliance. Among its key products is Domyn Large, a 260-billion-parameter language model designed for highly critical enterprise applications.
The company is also developing Colosseum, an infrastructure it describes as Europe’s largest supercomputer dedicated to AI. According to Domyn, the system will be capable of supporting models with over a trillion parameters and achieving a performance of more than 115 exaflops thanks to NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.nnThe company’s partners and collaborating organisations include Microsoft, NVIDIA and several international financial and industrial groups. Domyn is also one of the signatories to the European Code of Conduct for General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models, alongside companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Mistral AI.
What is at stake: European technological autonomy
The Frontier AI Grand Challenge, launched by the Commission in February 2026, stems from a specific sense of urgency: Europe cannot afford to remain a passive consumer of technologies developed elsewhere for much longer. Dependence on large American and Chinese models raises issues that go far beyond technical efficiency: they concern data security, regulatory control, the protection of intellectual property and, ultimately, the continent’s digital sovereignty.
