Coalition Pushes for European AI Infrastructure Priority
A new manifesto requests that Horizon Europe prioritize decentralized networking in its €175 billion research budget.
Updated on Oct. 22, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
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A coalition of academics and industry associations has published a manifesto urging the European Union to prioritize advanced networking research in its next funding cycle. The proposal advocates for decentralizing data stores to improve AI performance and decrease reliance on foreign infrastructure providers.
Why it matters
As AI models demand higher bandwidth and lower latency, the coalition argues that strategic investment in edge computing and distributed infrastructure is critical to maintaining European technological sovereignty.
The proposal targets the €175 billion Horizon Europe budget for 2028–2034 to support advanced networking infrastructure. This funding aims to facilitate decentralized AI inference by moving knowledge processing to distributed edge nodes.
The players
Datacom Industry Association
A trade organization representing networking and data communication stakeholders advocating for infrastructure development.
Horizon Europe
The European Union's key research and innovation funding program with a planned €175 billion budget for 2028-2034.
The details
The manifesto proposes the adoption of inference delivery networks—distributed systems that push AI processing closer to the user to reduce network congestion. By prioritizing Coordination and Support Actions, the plan seeks to bridge communication gaps between industry actors to build a more diverse domestic infrastructure. This strategy is designed to counteract the current market tendency toward large, foreign-controlled centralized data centers.
Timeline
2028-2034 is the period for the next Horizon Europe research and innovation cycle.
The Tech Race
The manifesto aims to steer the Horizon Europe research program toward domestic infrastructure autonomy. It directly challenges the dominance of foreign giants by advocating for a decentralized, European-built network architecture.
The push for decentralized networking aims to reduce latency for AI applications, potentially improving response times for data-heavy European digital services. These shifts would primarily affect enterprise developers and infrastructure architects once research is translated into deployed hardware.
The takeaway
The coalition is attempting to bake sovereignty into the next generation of European internet architecture. Stakeholders should monitor the 2028–2034 Horizon Europe budgetary sessions to see which specific networking mandates survive the committee process.
Further reading
For broader coverage of regional infrastructure strategy, see Artificial Intelligence.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Science Business.
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