EMPYREAN envisages a hyper-distributed computing paradigm, based on federations of collaborative and heterogeneous IoT devices and resources (e.g. on RISC-V) across different providers and networks. These federations, namely Associations, operate autonomously and interconnect seamlessly utilizing distributed, cognitive and dynamic AI-enabled decision-making, to balance computing tasks and data inside an Association as well as between Associations in a multi-agent manner and across central computing environments, optimizing resources and providing scalability, resiliency, energy efficiency and quality of service.