2025 marked a year of strategic consolidation and re-newed momentum for the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), underscoring its central mission to bridge applica-tion-oriented mathematics, artificial intelligence, da-ta-driven methods, and high-performance computing (HPC). Guided by the question of how AI and learning can be combined with mathematical and computation-al methods to drive innovation and enable optimal, trustworthy decisions in the real world, ZIB sharpened its profile as an institute that connects modeling and optimization, learning and AI, and ... .