HiPEAC

HiPEAC Vision 2026: Why Europe should create its own future, not imitate others

HiPEAC Vision 2026 front cover

  • Announcing the latest edition of the HiPEAC Vision, the annual roadmapping document from the EU-funded HiPEAC (High Performance Edge And Cloud) project.

  • The main message of the HiPEAC Vision 2026 is that Europe should chart its own course in computing, rather than blindly following what other countries do. While lacking the scale of other world regions, Europe has multiple strengths it can leverage to build a robust, resilient, and sustainable computing infrastructure fit for the AI age.
  • In HiPEAC’s ‘next computing paradigm’ (NCP), computing is distributed on demand rather than systematically requiring cloud resources. Dynamically composing services at the user’s request, the NCP will require reconfigurable hardware substrates that provide agile adaption to changing requirements.
  • As AI transforms the way software and hardware are developed, Europe should aim for the areas where it can gain a strategic advantage, for example in EDA tools, or by combining European strengths in formal verification with the automation provided by AI.
  • In this distributed paradigm, cybersecurity becomes even more important, especially in the age of AI-generated attacks, while open source provides a mechanism for Europe’s diverse computing providers to work together.

With the ripple effects from advances in artificial intelligence (AI) – mostly emanating from outside of Europe and taking place at breakneck speed – spreading relentlessly across the computing ecosystem, the HiPEAC Vision 2026 offers a calm, measured appraisal of the state of the art and offers a path forward for European computing research. Rather than blindly copying the trajectory of other countries, it argues that Europe must chart its own course based around the ‘next computing paradigm’ proposed in previous editions of the HiPEAC Vision. In this vision, computing is a utility which blends seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life, offering users services on demand while eschewing the antisocial incentives of the attention economy and surveillance capitalism.

‘Artificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology in the domains covered by HiPEAC during the last 20 years. The pace of change is stupefying,’ says Marc Duranton (CEA), the HiPEAC Vision editor-in-chief. ‘In contrast to the dominant trends of concentrating computing resources in gigantic data centres, represented by the hyperscalers, the HiPEAC Vision calls for distributing computing on demand, spread from near the user to the cloud, with a “local-first” mindset. We foresee an agentic AI infrastructure where agents and specialized action models are dynamically selected based on user criteria, which can include non-functional properties including privacy, safety, energy, latency, cost and sustainability.’

‘This edition of the HiPEAC Vision rejects the narrative that Europe cannot compete with the rest of the world,’ adds Professor Koen De Bosschere (Ghent University), the coordinator of HiPEAC. ‘While Europe lacks companies on the scale of those in the US or China, it has plenty of strengths which should be leveraged to deliver rightsized computing infrastructure for flexible, sustainable, resilient operation – all while respecting the values and culture which are important to European society.’

cartoon showing two racers representing the US and China running into fog, while a racer representing Europe turns off and runs towards a town with a HiPEAC logo on it

Illustrated by cartoons exclusively produced for HiPEAC by the Belgian comic artist Arnulf, this year’s HiPEAC Vision has chapters dedicated to the following key topics:

  • The ‘next computing paradigm’
  • Artificial intelligence
  • New hardware
  • Tools
  • Cybersecurity
  • Open source
  • Sustainability
  • State of the European Union

Each chapter has its own recommendations, while a consolidated list of recommendations is also available, grouped into technological, standardization, methodological and policy recommendations.

This year, HiPEAC has also developed a tool which uses the HiPEAC Vision as the exclusive basis for returning answers via AI chatbots, which can be connected to your chatbot of choice via HiPEAC’s MCP server. This is complemented by a dedicated tool to explore the text from different angles, such as the policy, industry, investment or educational perspective.

Summary

HiPEAC Vision 2026 emphasizes that Europe must forge its own path in computing, leveraging strengths while adapting to AI’s rapid advancements and prioritizing distributed, user-focused infrastructures.