Digital Europe Programme - Performance

Programme in a nutshell

Concrete examples of achievements (*)

^{(*) Key achievements in the table state which period they relate to. Many come from the implementation of the predecessor programmes under the 2014-2020 multiannual financial framework. This is expected and is due to the multiannual life cycle of EU programmes and the projects they finance, where results often follow only after completion of the programmes.} 

^{(**) European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking.}

^{(***) The three supercomputers were procured by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking using funds from the 2014-2020 multiannual financial framework.} 

^{(****) Artificial Intelligence.} 

Budget for 2021-2027

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Rationale and design of the programme

The Digital Europe programme (DEP) is a new EU funding programme focused on bringing digital technology to businesses, citizens and public administrations. It provides strategic funding to face challenges in the area of digital technology and infrastructure, supporting projects in six key capacity areas: supercomputing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced digital skills and the wide use of digital technologies across the economy and society, including through digital innovation hubs. A new specific objective was integrated into the Digital Europe Programme with the adoption of the Chips Act Regulation, which promotes Europe’s leadership in semiconductor technologies and applications. 

Budget

Budget programming (million EUR) (*):

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Financial programming (*):
+ EUR 488.8 million (+ 6%)
compared to the legal basis (**)

^{* Top-ups pursuant to Art. 5 MFF regulation are excluded from financial programming in this comparison. Chips Act is included}

The Digital Europe programme’s original budget was EUR 7.588 billion covering five specific objectives over the 2021-2027 period. For the implementation of the new specific objective 6 (semiconductors), EUR 800 million were transferred to Digital Europe programme. On the other hand, EUR 270 million were transferred from the Digital Europe programme to the Secure Connectivity Programme. Several cuts (for instance, to ENISA to respond to a growing cybersecurity threat in light of the changed political situation) and small top-ups amount in total to an additional cut of EUR 265 million. These changes and the adoption of the Chips Act made the programme’s total budget to increase by six percent compared to the initial programming.

Budget performance – implementation

Multiannual cumulative implementation rate at the end of 2022 (million EUR)^(*):

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Annual voted budget implementation (million EUR)^(*):

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Contribution to horizontal priorities

Green budgeting

Contribution to green budgeting priorities (million EUR):

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Several actions in the first work programmes are expected to make a contribution to climate change mitigation or adaptation. This is mainly the case of the ‘Destination Earth’ initiative, which will develop a very high-precision digital model of the Earth to enable the visualisation, monitoring and forecasting of natural and human activity on the planet. This will allow us to be better prepared to respond to major natural disasters, adapt to climate change and predict its socioeconomic impact. A small number of other actions – such as the Digital Product Passport, an information system that provides data on a product’s sustainability and environmental impact throughout its lifecycle, from design to disposal, currently under development and financed by DEP – are expected to have a non-marginal positive contribution to climate change mitigation or adaptation objectives.

In the 2023/2024 work programmes, Destination Earth and the Digital Product Passport will continue to be funded. A small number of other actions are expected to make a positive contribution to climate change mitigation. For instance, a new action ‘EU Energy Saving Reference Framework’ will help conserve electricity when there is a shortage of energy supply. This framework for energy-saving applications will support consumers and businesses in enhancing energy efficiency, for example through recommendations on when to increase or decrease energy usage based on regional demand and usage patterns, and personalised guidance for eco-friendly consumption, integrating data from smart metres. The Green Deal data space will offer access to a variety of data relating to the environment and the EU’s climate objectives, for instance by providing detailed data on geospatial systems, localised water, soil and air pollution, and energy supply and consumption. The Agricultural data space will enable the agriculture sector to transparently share and access data promoting its economic and environmental performance. Similarly, the Energy data space will provide access to data to foster the development of innovative energy services to optimise the electricity grids and improve energy efficiency. It will play a key role in increasing the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources. The climate contributions after 2024 will depend on the actions to be funded in subsequent work programmes.

In terms of results, the procurements of all major components under Destination Earth have been completed (‘core platform, ‘data lake’ and the first two ‘digital twins’) and the whole infrastructure will be deployed. The first range of services, including the first two digital twins on climate-change adaptation and extreme weather events, will be made available in mid-2024.

The programme will deliver digital solutions and contribute to closing the digital skills gap, but is not expected to make a direct contribution to biodiversity or clean air. During the implementation of the programme, this ex ante assessment will be revised should specific projects make a tangible contribution to these horizontal priorities that could not be anticipated at the start of the implementation.

Gender

Contribution to gender equality (million EUR) (*):

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• In line with the Commission’s methodology to track gender-equality-related expenditure, the programme has been attributed a score of 0*, which means that the programme’s impact on gender will be determined ex post, once sufficient information from the programming and implementation phase is available. The contribution from DEP to gender equality in the first set of work programmes may be relevant for the training initiatives to promote advanced digital skills organised under the 'advanced digital skills’ specific objective, in line with Article 7 of the Digital Europe regulation, according to which gender balance should be taken into account. The 2021-2022 work programme states that the specialised education programmes, while mainly focusing on excellence, should also address the gender gap. The 2023-2024 work programme introduces two new actions (EUR 8 million in total) to boost the development of digital skills from an early age, particularly for girls, and to promote gender convergence in information and communications technologies. Should the implementation of the abovementioned actions in specific objective 4 entail a contribution, this will be reflected in the respective programme performance statement.

Digital

Contribution to digital transition (million EUR):

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The full envelope of the DEP contributes to the digital transition. The contribution is thus 100% of the budget committed in a given year.

Budget performance – outcomes

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• The implementation of the DEP programme is on track to achieve its objectives, the procedures to achieve the milestones for the upcoming years are being implemented and first results have been achieved. 
• Regarding the 'high-performance computing’ specific objective, the procurement of high-performance computing infrastructures is ongoing to ensure that the supercomputers are available to stakeholders. 
  • In 2023, the third precursor-to-exascale supercomputer, MARENOSTRUM V, was inaugurated in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. This EuroHPC Joint Undertaking system, with a peak performance of 314 petaflops (314 million billion calculations per second), has entered the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world at 8th place. It also ranks at 6th place of the most energy-efficient systems. This supercomputer is specially tailored to strengthen European medical research through drug research, the development of vaccines, virus spread simulations and artificial intelligence and big data processing applications. Currently three of these systems are in the top 10 of the world’s most powerful computers. They are also among the most energy-efficient supercomputers.
  • In October 2023, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking awarded the procurement of JUPITER – the first system in Europe to achieve exascale performance, i.e. the ability to execute over 1 billion calculations per second. The system will place the EU as a world leader in supercomputing and be operational by late 2024, and is expected to have a major impact on European scientific excellence and industrial innovation.
• Concerning the ‘artificial intelligence’ specific objective, the first calls that will enable the usage of data spaces, testing and experimentation facilities, the cloud-to-edge marketplace and an artificial-intelligence-on-demand platform were published and evaluated, and the actual implementation of the projects started in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023. The initial data on usage of these platforms will be available as of 2024, when the infrastructures become operational. Considerable progress has already been achieved.
  • The Simpl Programme, an open-source large-scale, modular, secure, energy-efficient and interoperable European cloud-to-edge smart middleware to support the data spaces (EUR 46 million) was launched in December 2023 and is expected to deliver its initial results by the end of 2024. 
  • Four sectorial testing and experimentation facilities in the sectors/areas of agrifood, healthcare, manufacturing and smart cities and communities started their work in January 2023. As of 2024, these facilities will offer highly specialised testing and validation services to artificial intelligence innovators, helping them to speed up cutting-edge solutions and bring them to the market. Co-funded with EUR 220 million over 5 years, they bring together 128 partners from 16 countries.
  • 21 grants to fund data spaces have been launched so far, with total EU funding of EUR 115 million and involving around 410 beneficiaries. These cover the sectors/areas of tourism, skills, manufacturing, health, mobility, smart communities, the Green Deal and agriculture. 
    • These efforts have already yielded results. The ‘European cancer imaging’ initiative, launched in September 2023, has linked up 36 datasets of images of nine cancer types, for a total of over 200 000 image series of about 20 000 individuals. The ‘European genomic data infrastructure’ project, through a starter kit, gives all countries the technical capability to access more than 2 500 synthetic genomics and phenotypic data (including cancer, rare diseases and population genomics) across borders. 
    • The deployment of the Manufacturing data space has been launched: two large-scale projects are currently ongoing, focusing on predictive maintenance and on the deployment of a data infrastructure for energy management. 
    • The preparatory action for the common European agricultural data space has identified over 400 data-sharing initiatives already active in the sector in Europe. It has developed proposals for building blocks, governance structures and business models, and opened up interim results for consultation, with the aim to ensure wide acceptance and use of the data space. To lay the foundation for tailored feedback, webinars (including for Member State representatives) and outreach activities have been organised. Moreover, results of actions programmed under Horizon Europe to inform the development of the data space have been taken into account, and exchanges with the the agri-food part of the DEP ‘Testing & Experimenting Trustworthy AI Facilities’ programme and the evolving ‘Agriculture of data’ Horizon Europe partnership have been organised.
    • The preparatory activities for the common European mobility data space identified over 270 data ecosystems in the mobility and transport sector in Europe and recommended common building blocks for the creation of the data space. It helped create a community of key stakeholders and strengthened the momentum to align and collaborate at the EU level. The deployment action for the European mobility data space, which started in November 2023, will deploy real-life implementation projects in nine cities and regions across Europe to help improve the travel experience for commuters and travellers, and assist public authorities in policymaking and traffic management.The Digital Finance platform has recently made available a data hub to facilitate the exchange of data between national competent authorities and innovative financial firms. It provides synthetic supervisory data for the purpose of testing new solutions and training artificial intelligence / machine learning models.
  • In 2023, the open data platformed access to over 1.6 million open datasets held by public sector bodies. It provides a number of services to promote access and reuse of public sector information, in agreement with the open data directive.
• On the ‘cybersecurity and trust’ specific objective, the procedures required to launch the actions that will procure cybersecurity infrastructures and tools are on track. Most of the projects implemented via grants or joint procurement will start implementation in early 2024. As it takes approximately 3 years to develop such advanced infrastructures, the target can only be expected to be fully met when the projects are completed.
  • As a first result, a network of National Coordination Centres, comprising one centre in each Member State, has been established. Their mission is to provide access to research and technological expertise in cybersecurity at the national/regional levels and ensure cross-border cooperation.
• On the ‘advanced digital skills’ specific objective, the first calls that launched the implementation of training for advanced digital skills in 2021 and early 2022 were concluded, evaluated and 20 grant agreements have been signed and projects started to be implemented at the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023. The call published in late 2022 has also been closed: 12 grant agreements were signed, and the projects started at the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024. One call from 2023 was already concluded and evaluated, while the indicative start date of the projects is Q2 2024. 
  • In 2023, over 2 500 students enrolled in training activities of the specialised education programmes or in the first set of short-term training courses delivered to small and medium-sized enterprises and employees from various industry sectors and the public sector. The specialised programmes and training sessions varied from the designed master’s programmes for the acquisition of advanced digital skills for specific sectors, such as health and civil engineering, to training courses, workshops and bootcamps in areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, the internet of things, blockchain, quantum computing or robotics. New master’s courses have been developed and will start to be taught in fall 2024. For example, in the project ManagiDiTH, eight consortium partners from four European countries developed a new master’s degree programme, ‘Master of Managing Digital Transformation in the Health Sector’, which is designed to contribute to the digitisation of healthcare services by teaching data science and information system resources to improve processes and clinical approaches. The programme is a joint degree master and the individual modules will be delivered online in English by the participating higher educational institutions.
• To support public and private organisations in their digital transition, DEP set up a network of European digital innovation hubs in all EU Member States and in Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, which comprises 151 hubs. Hub services are available in nearly 90% of the European regions, serving public and private organisations, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, for instance with facilities allowing them to test before investing in digital solutions and technologies, financing advice or training and skills development. Their strong regional presence leaves them well placed to provide the services local companies need. 
• On the work strand ‘confidence in digital transformation’, two main milestones have been achieved.
  • 25 Safer Internet Centres were established, providing safety information, educational resources, public awareness tools and counselling and reporting services to young people, teachers, and parents. Helplines offer advice and support to young users, while hotlines analyse and process reports of suspected online child sexual abuse material from the public, leading to its removal.
  • The European Digital Media Observatory, a network of 14 national and multinational hubs covering all Member States, has been established, supporting and coordinating fact-checkers, researchers and media practitioners. By using the hub’s specific knowledge of local information environments, the observatory strengthens the detection and analysis of disinformation campaigns, improving public awareness, and designs effective responses for national audiences across the EU, such as targeted actions on the war in Ukraine, the Israel–Hamas conflict or the 2024 EU elections.
• The work strand to digitalise public services is well on track and initial results have been achieved. 
  • Large-scale pilot projects involving over 250 public authorities and private entities across almost all Member States, along with Iceland, Norway and Ukraine, have begun piloting the European Digital Identity Wallet across 11 important use-cases, including mobile driving licences, payments, travel credentials, organisational digital identity, e-prescriptions, educational/professional credentials, social security documents and identification for accessing public services, opening a bank account and registering for a mobile phone SIM card.
  • The Once-Only Technical System allows both citizens and businesses to carry out all their administrative procedures across the EU faster, as it enables the automated exchange of evidence (in the form of documents) between cross-border competent authorities. All Member States have started to connect their national infrastructures to the system and are currently onboarding their competent authorities. 
  • Authorities in 24 countries already use eLab to screen e-shops and platforms for consumer rights violations and investigate malpractices online. For example, 16 000 products were screened in November 2022 and 2 000 misleading price announcements were detected over the 2022 Black Friday sales. In 2023 the tool’s capacity doubled, as over 30 000 products were screened in November, leading to concrete enforcement actions in several countries.
• The Interoperable Europe work strand is on track and main milestones have been achieved. For instance, the Interoperability Test Bed, a Commission solution offering services and components for conformance testing and validation, has so far been actively used by 37 projects, having recorded over 118 000 validations and 66 000 test sessions. In 2023, 2 870 digital solutions were available to governments on the ‘Joinup’ platform funded by the DEP, which received 1 million visits per year.
• Geographical balance must be ensured by aiming to provide wide access across the EU to infrastructures, tools and services funded by the Digital Europe programme. Data spaces, for instance, will allow businesses and the public sector across the whole EU to share data in strategic economic areas in a safe and trustworthy manner. In SO 3, a network of National Coordination Centres has already been established in all Member States to build capacities at the national level, establish synergies among cybersecurity initiatives and ensure wide participation of relevant stakeholders in cybersecurity projects. In specific objective 4, all Member States except Malta are already involved in training initiatives. Several master’s programmes are to be offered online and as a joint degree programme with other universities. 
• The services of the 14 national and multinational hubs of the European Digital Media Observatory cover all Member States. By using the hubs’ specific knowledge of local information environments, the observatory strengthens the detection and analysis of disinformation campaigns and designs effective responses across the whole EU, such as targeted actions on the war in Ukraine, the Israel–Hamas conflict or the 2024 EU elections. Similarly, Safer Internet Centres have been established in most Member States, offering advice and support to young users, teachers and parents, and supporting the removal of online child sexual abuse material. 
• In terms of their geographical outreach, the European digital innovation hub services are available to companies and public sector organisations in 223 regions or nearly 90% of European regions. As companies can reach out to hubs outside their region, the entire EU is covered by the services of the network, which clearly helps in bridging the digital geographical divide.
• Most of the abovementioned results are also relevant in the context of the new ‘Strategic technologies for Europe platform’ initiative, as they are deployments in the area of deep and digital technologies or related services, or address the skills gaps in critical technologies aimed at decreasing the strategic dependencies of the EU. 
• The Digital Europe programme complements several other funding programmes, in particular Horizon Europe and the digital part of the Connecting Europe Facility. These three programmes are contributing to the Digital Decade targets for 2030 at different levels (prepare, deploy, connect). Horizon Europe supports research, technological development, demonstration, piloting, proof-of-concept, testing and innovation – including pre-commercial deployment – for innovative digital technologies. The Digital Europe programme focuses on large-scale digital capacity and infrastructure building to support the uptake and deployment of critical existing or tested innovative digital solutions across the EU. The Connecting Europe Facility supports the high-capacity broadband and 5G corridors necessary to deploy digital services and technologies across the EU. Synergies among the three programmes are anchored in the design of the 2021/2022 and 2023/2024 work programmes, for instance in the areas of European Common data infrastructure and services, along with supercomputing/quantum computing. The DEP-funded sectorial data spaces benefit from Horizon-Europe-funded projects that, for instance, support digital technologies, methods, architectures and processes for user-friendly, safe, trustworthy, transparent and environmentally sustainable collection, storage and processing of data. A concrete example is the Horizon-2020-funded ’Beyond one million genomes’ project, which prepared the groundwork for the DEP-funded ‘European genomic data infrastructure’ project, by defining the legal, technological and data-related requirements and guiding Member States’ agreement on respective recommendations.In the area of supercomputing, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking draws funds from the DEP, Horizon Europe and the Connecting Europe Facility. Synergies between these three programmes are being exploited to be complementary and mutually reinforcing. 
• With regard to synergies across different horizontal priorities, the entire DEP budget envelope contributes to the digital transformation, while some actions also contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. This is particularly the case for Destination Earth, and some contributions can also be expected from other topics, such as the Digital Product Passport, the EU energy saving reference framework, the Agricultural data space, the Energy data space and the Green Deal data space. 
• The Digital Europe programme, while ensuring continuity of activities, has also proven to be flexible in responding to new societal and economic challenges and a changing geopolitical landscape. As a result, the programme has introduced new initiatives as shown below.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the major supply shortage of semiconductors. DEP reacted swiftly with the integration of a new specific objective to promote leadership in semiconductor technologies with the adoption of the Chips Act⁽²⁹⁾
  • Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the ensuing heightened risk of large-scale cybersecurity threats led to the support for the EU Cyber Solidarity Act, which introduced the Cyber Emergency Mechanism into DEP to increase preparedness and response to large-scale cybersecurity incidents.
• An expected challenge for DEP, as a new programme that often supports large-scale and complex deployments to serve the entire EU, is that the establishment of communities of targeted stakeholders to respond to funding opportunities takes time, and an increased effort to raise awareness is necessary. To remedy the lack of awareness and support at the national level, a network of specific National Contact Points for DEP was set up in early 2023 to support applicants and the implementation of DEP, which in early 2024 comprises 130 established contact points.
• Due to the delay in the publication of the first work programmes (published in November 2021), the first calls were launched only in early 2022 and except for some procurement actions, the actual implementation of projects started in late 2022 or early 2023. Subsequent work programmes were launched in early March 2023 and measures have been taken to accelerate and simplify the implementation process (e.g. better guidance on security restrictions and a simplified application process).
• Participation restrictions brought about by Article 12.5 and Article 12.6, while being key to protecting the EU in key security areas, have also been a hurdle in the implementation, leading to delays and changes in grant agreements. Since the start of the programme, the awareness surrounding security restrictions has significantly increased due to wider outreach activities, training session and information sharing via Programme Committees, National Contact Points and information days. 
• As the DEP is a co-funding programme, the investments from the EU budget need to be matched by Member States. The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine and inflation have affected national plans for public spending, which needed to reprioritise investments and support to other areas. This slightly impacted some activities, especially where the contribution needed from Member States was more considerable. Such is the case, for instance, for the joint procurement for high-performance computing infrastructure in the ‘high-performance computing’ specific objective, in which there were delays in the procurement of supercomputers in 2023. Given the success of the procurement and deployment of EuroHPC supercomputers – which are now among the best in the world (three EuroHPC systems are in the top 10 of the world’s most powerful computers) – in the previous multiannual financial framework by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, this activity strand is expected to continue to deploy a world-leading data infrastructure and related services.
• The widely used ‘simple grant’, with a 50% co-financing rate, is an important tool to leverage digital solutions across the EU, but has represented a challenge for some types of stakeholders. The low funding rate also leads beneficiaries, including Member States, to look for other complementary funding, which has proven to be cumbersome and challenging to implement in practice. 

^{(29)Regulation (EU) 2023/1781.}

MFF 2014-2020 – CEF Telecom

CEF Telecom supported from 2014 to 2020 the deployment of an ecosystem of trusted cross-border digital service infrastructures⁽⁵⁾ that are essential to triggering the digital transformation of public sector services in the Member States, all for the benefit of citizens and businesses.

^{(5)  Europeana, e-identification, e-signature, e-delivery, e-invoicing, e-archiving, public open data, automated translation, cybersecurity, eProcurement, business registers interconnection system, eHealth, electronic exchange of social security information, the European e-Justice portal, European digital media observatory, European platform on digital skills and jobs, online dispute resolution, safer internet, EU student e-card and blockchain.}

Budget implementation

• With an overall investment of almost EUR 280 million in the core service platforms, the Commission enabled the EU-wide interoperability of specific digital services such as eHealth, public open data, e identification or  cybersecurity. With an EU contribution of almost EUR 365 million in generic services and an overall leveraged amount of more than EUR 526 million, the uptake of these services with CEF support reached a portfolio of 735 projects in the Member States and participating countries in the European Economic Area by the end of 2021. The last grant agreements under CEF Telecom were signed in 2021. Nearly one third of the total portfolio of projects are under implementation due to the duration of the actions funded by the programme, which go up to 4 years. CEF digital services support EU citizens, businesses and public administrations in interconnecting and adapting their systems to become interoperable across borders.
• The cumulative implementation table for CEF Telecom can be found in the CEF programme performance statement.

Performance assessment

• The deployment of the digital service infrastructures has been marked by a considerable expansion of the ecosystem, going from eight digital service infrastructures in the first working programme to 20 in the latest one. As a matter of fact, the programme started supporting interoperability in a limited set of areas such as e-government, cybersecurity and the cultural sector. Over the years, the programme started enabling, through various solutions, interoperability in other areas such as health, justice, social security, education and skills, to name a few.
• The digital service infrastructures implemented under the telecommunications part of the Connecting Europe Facility contribute to the EU’s preparedness to deal with cyberthreats and incidents, encompassing the need for well-resourced Member State computer security incident response teams and swift and effective operational cooperation between them. Their operational cooperation is facilitated by interacting with the core service platform cooperation mechanism of the cybersecurity digital service infrastructures, MeliCERTes, which supports information sharing, facilitates a shared understanding of artefacts, threats and incidents, provides secure communications and enhances the exchange of data between them. As from 2019, an additional cooperation mechanism to facilitate the creation of European-level information sharing and analysis centres has been set up.
• Another example is the e-health digital service infrastructure, which facilitates the movement of health data across national borders, ensuring the continuity of care and the safety of citizens seeking healthcare outside their home country, and enabling the pooling of EU-wide medical expertise to treat rare diseases. To date, 117 projects for e-health have been deployed in all Member States, with overall funding of EUR 29 million.
• An overview of the performance of the actions deployed with the support of the telecommunications part of the Connecting Europe Facility is available here. This data will feed into the ex post evaluation of the programme.

Contribution to the sustainable development goals