In the Netherlands, for instance, there is "the national supercomputer" Snellius: https://www.surf.nl/en/services/snellius-the-national-superc... I am not sure about its budget, but my impression as a user is that its resources are never fully used. At least, none of my jobs ever had to queue. I doubt that it can compete with the scale of resources that FAANG companies have available, but then again, I also doubt how research would benefit.

Sure, academia could build LLMs, and there is at least one large-scale project for that: https://gpt-nl.com/ On the other hand, this kind of models still need to demonstrate specific scientific value that goes beyond using a chatbot for generating ideas and summarizing documents.

So I fully agree that the research budget cuts in the past decades have been catastrophic, and probably have contributed to all the disasters the world is currently facing. But I think that funding prestigious super-projects is not the best way to spend funds.