NOS News•
The new NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) will be headquartered in the Netherlands. This is what the coalition announced.
The exact location is still being researched and the number of people who will be working there is also still unknown. The fund will be officially launched in July at the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
He says Amsterdam may be one of the candidates for the site Financial Times. The paper describes the fund’s arrival as “an important catalyst for the Dutch tech sector”.
The fund is created to drive and develop innovations within NATO on societal and defense issues. The Ministry of Defense expects that the Foundation in the Netherlands can ensure that “innovative Dutch companies can increase their possibilities of finding their way to capital”.
billion euros
A total of €1 billion has been made available to the fund, for a period of fifteen years. The Netherlands pledged a contribution of 55 million euros for that period. According to the Department of Defense, the United States is the only NATO member that does not participate in the fund. The reason for this is not clear.
This is not the first time NATO has set up a division in the Netherlands. For example, there is a command center in Brunssum and the NCIA agency in The Hague, which buys and maintains communications systems for NATO purposes.