Swiss researchers have launched the Swiss AI Initiative, a nationwide effort to build open‑source foundation models. Backed by the Swiss National AI Institute—a joint venture of ETH AI and EPFL AI— the program offers free access to the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, Alps, for academic and industrial projects and through collaborative research sessions across Switzerland.

Funding began in December 2023 with an initial allocation of 10m GPU hours on Alps, complemented by a 20m CHF grant from the ETH Domain. The initiative now aggregates the expertise of 800 researchers, including 70 AI‑focused professors, drawn from more than ten Swiss universities and research institutes and leading AI data science teams worldwide.

Alps hosts over 10,000 GH200 GPUs, making it one of the world’s leading AI supercomputers. Engineers at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre schedule regular compute calls, enabling cross‑institutional collaboration and rapid prototyping of models that can be released openly as software, data, or pretrained weights for commercial use across Swiss SMEs and start‑ups worldwide.

By publishing transparent artifacts, the initiative empowers Swiss SMEs and start‑ups to adopt AI responsibly. The open‑science model also attracts international partners eager to benchmark against Swiss‑developed benchmarks. With this infrastructure, Switzerland positions itself as a leading hub for AI research that balances academic freedom with industry applicability and fostering innovation across the broader AI community.