Energy efficiency and sustainability of AI data processing in Data Centres (IA)

Developing an agile and secure single market for data and trustworthy AI services is central to Europe’s digital sovereignty and competitiveness. The convergence of the Telco-Edge-Cloud continuum (3C) with open orchestration platforms will unlock the transformative potential of AI across strategic sectors, from mobility and energy to health and manufacturing, fostering new services and business models. Building a sovereign Open Internet Stack, rooted in open-source, interoperable and standard-based solutions, will reinforce trust, resilience and innovation, while ensuring Europe retains control over critical digital infrastructures. At the same time, decentralised and federated approaches to AI data processing, combined with breakthroughs in sustainable data centres, will help overcome Europe’s compute bottlenecks and dependencies, and reduce the environmental footprint of AI. By aligning with the Data Union Strategy and Common European Data Spaces, these efforts will deliver secure, compliant and adaptive data-sharing frameworks that empower citizens, businesses and administrations. Together, they will strengthen Europe’s ability to innovate, scale and lead globally in data and AI, anchoring digital sovereignty in line with EU values and strategic interests.

Legal entities established in China are not eligible to participate in both Research and Innovation Actions (RIAs) and Innovation Actions (IAs) falling under this destination. For additional information please see “Restrictions on the participation of legal entities established in China” found in General Annex B of the General Annexes.

Expected Outcome:

Pilots for new technologies and a demonstration site which contribute to energy-efficient and sustainable AI data processing in data centres, reinforcing EU strategic autonomy and climate goals. Project results are expected to contribute to one or more of the following outcomes (see more details in scope):

• Demonstrated innovations that substantially improve heat removal from high-power AI chips (e.g. direct on-chip cooling, advanced thermal interface materials, multi-scale thermal management), enabling higher performance without thermal throttling. This should lead to lower cooling energy needs and higher reliability for dense AI workloads.
• Prototypes of novel backup power systems (such as graphene-enhanced batteries) that operate with minimal cooling requirements, improving data centre resilience and enabling better use of renewable power.
• New methods and frameworks that optimise the entire data centre for energy-efficient AI processing. This includes intelligent workload scheduling and AI model optimisation techniques to reduce energy use (e.g. carbon-aware job scheduling and power capping to cut energy demand and peak temperatures), as well as designs for integrating on-site/off-site renewables and waste-heat reuse.
• As a result of all the above bullet points, an open pilot demonstration site that allows for the testing and integration of the outcomes of these projects and serves as the European reference for showcasing the breakthroughs and cutting-edge technologies for energy-efficient and sustainable data centres developed under this topic. This site should serve as a model for technology uptake for the European data centre industry.

Outcomes should demonstrate potential for improved power usage effectiveness and utilisation of waste heat in external applications, aligned with European targets for carbon-neutral heating/cooling.

Scope:

Actions should address the following development areas:

1. Direct on-chip cooling and thermal management, including novel and innovative cooling techniques applied at chip and module level (direct liquid cooling, heat spreaders, thermal interface materials, and advanced packaging) and multi-scale thermal management techniques.
2. Energy-efficient power backup and storage systems: Innovations in early-stage energy storage concepts (graphene-enhanced batteries, supercapacitors, and other emerging battery chemistries) and approaches for net-zero backup.
3. Sustainable data centre architectures and AI workload optimization: addressing AI-driven workload scheduling, adaptive power management, dynamic resource allocation and integration of data centre heat capture and reuse.
4. Materials research for energy efficiency: Projects to make use of existing research in new materials and components supporting energy efficiency and thermal management, and to employ these for data centres benefit.
5. Optimisation of data centre operation and functioning: explore AI solutions to optimize the Data centre functioning, computing architecture, and virtualization, minimizing its carbon and environmental footprint.
6. Integration of data centres into energy systems and the wider region: including solutions that integrate Data centres into energy system planning and operation.

Aside from these, the pilot demonstration site must allow to combine the outcomes supplied by the other funded projects in the topic and enable for showcasing, benchmarking, and promoting their results across interested industrial stakeholders, including the European data centre and collocation industry, as well as other AI data centre operators, such as cloud and edge computing providers.

Overall, this topic is expected to fund four projects. Three projects are expected to address expected outcomes 1-3, while a fourth project is expected for expected outcome 4 (the open pilot demonstration site). For projects addressing expected outcomes 1-3 at least two use cases should showcase each project results.

Beneficiaries that intend to transfer ownership or grant an exclusive licence must formally notify the granting authority (i.e. DG-CNECT and HaDEA) before the intended transfer or licensing takes place and the granting authority may up to four years after the end of the action object to a transfer of ownership or the exclusive licensing of results.

Projects funded under this topic are encouraged to build synergies and leverage their outcomes with funded projects from Cluster 5 HORIZON-CL5-2027-05-D4-06: Thermal energy optimisation and waste heat recovery of high energy demand IT rooms in buildings or small edge data centres.

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