The Human Brain Project (HBP) was a European Union flagship research initiative that ran for about ten years, from 2013 to 2023, with funding on the order of a billion euros. It was launched as one of the EU’s largest-ever science programs, bringing together hundreds of researchers across many countries to advance the understanding of the brain through computing, neuroscience, and medicine.
The project’s most ambitious early framing - that it might simulate an entire human brain within a decade - drew sharp criticism from neuroscientists who considered it premature, and the program was reorganized in its early years toward a broader set of goals. What it ultimately delivered was less a single simulated brain than a set of shared research infrastructures: digital atlases of brain anatomy, simulation tools, and neuromorphic computing platforms.
Two of those platforms sit squarely at the meeting point of neuroscience and AI. SpiNNaker, the million-core machine at Manchester led by Steve Furber, and BrainScaleS, an analog neuromorphic system in Heidelberg, were both developed under the HBP to simulate spiking neural networks and to explore brain-inspired, energy-efficient computation.
The HBP’s mixed legacy - grand ambition, public controversy, and durable shared tools - made it a case study in how hard it is to “understand the brain” on a fixed schedule. Its infrastructure was carried forward after 2023 by the EBRAINS research platform, keeping the data and neuromorphic hardware available to the wider community.