The next cabinet will have to spend an extra €165 million a year to update the Dutch digital infrastructure or the country will lose its position as a scientific frontrunner, scientific research organisation NWO and IT innovation agency Surf have warned.

The Netherlands has two supercomputers used for massive calculations at high speed but neither is sufficiently powerful, duping PhD students in particular, the organisations said.

In the last 10 years, the Netherlands has dropped from the seventh to the 20th place in terms of supercomputer computing power. Snellius, one of the Dutch supercomputers, comes 78th in the world ranking, with almost 25 petaflops (calculation speed unit) compared to Germany’s Jupiter which has 1000 and is the world’s 4th fastest supercomputer.

Not only is Snellius not powerful enough, demand is such that scientists have to wait months to use it. The result is that Dutch PhDs are at a disadvantage compared to some of their European peers.

“In France or Finland, PhDs get their results within five minutes but here it can be a five-day wait. You can’t expect to achieve breakthrough results that way,” Luuk Visscher, theoretical chemistry professor at VU University, told Trouw.

The rise of AI is also putting more pressure on the digital infrastructure, Surf spokesman Tom Hoven said. Scientists are currently using facilities in Finland, but the Netherlands should be able to rely on its own systems to determine which projects and calculations should have priority.

The extra money, the agencies say, must boost investment, which has stalled since 2019, to prevent supercomputers, networking hubs and data facilities from disappearing altogether and create new, designated ones.

“The new supercomputer that is being built in Groningen will also be used by the government and companies and made for AI applications. The demand from science also includes non-AI-related calculations,” Hoven said.