The HORIZON-CL4-2025-04-DATA-02 call, under the Horizon Europe programme and the AI, Data and Robotics Partnership, seeks proposals that will empower AI and generative AI across the entire computing continuum – from high-performance cloud infrastructures to edge and IoT environments.

As the demand for AI-powered applications grows, Europe must overcome bottlenecks linked to energy use, latency, and data transfer. This call addresses these challenges by funding research on novel cloud-to-edge technologies that enable decentralised, scalable, and secure AI workflows and infrastructures. The goal is to make AI more accessible, interoperable, and energy-efficient, without compromising trust or performance.

Projects are expected to contribute to:

• seamless, trustworthy integration of computing and data environments across the cloud-edge-IoT continuum;
• AI-optimised resource orchestration, training, and inference across distributed infrastructures;
• strategic industrial cooperation to foster Europe’s open strategic autonomy in the AI and data economy;
• support for emerging AI-powered applications in key sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, smart cities, robotics, and transport.

Proposals should target one or more research areas, including:

• development of AI workflow orchestration tools optimised for heterogeneous infrastructures and metrics like latency, memory, and energy use;
• tools for federated and decentralised AI processing, including model and data parallelism, privacy-preserving mechanisms, and explainable cognitive optimisation;
• innovative techniques to reduce AI’s carbon footprint via hardware efficiency, approximation methods, and special-purpose accelerators.

Projects must engage with initiatives like the AI-on-Demand Platform, the Digital Europe Programme, and relevant IPCEI projects to ensure interoperability and ecosystem-wide value. Results are expected to be shared across the European research community to foster transparency, reuse, and cross-sector innovation.

The call opens on 10 June 2025 and closes on 2 October 2025 at 17:00 Brussels time, with a single-stage submission format.