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

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.