Europe’s big bet on the cloud remains without a data centre

Today, the Gaia-X Aisbl association (an international non-profit organisation) has over 300 members, including businesses and research centres, and describes itself not as a traditional standardisation body, but as the strategic driving force behind the European data ecosystem.

The most tangible outcome is the Trust Framework: the rules that determine who can access a shared data space and under what conditions. At the operational heart of the system are the digital clearing houses, the nodes that verify participants’ identities and compliance.

The figures speak for themselves. Several technology companies have already set up operational clearing houses: Aruba in Italia, NTT Data in Japan, T-Systems and DeltaDao in Germany, and Aire Networks and Arsys in Spain. A decentralised network that is growing in membership and has already expanded beyond European borders.

With the Danube release, Gaia-X has introduced the principle of “bring your own rules”: the governance authorities of individual data spaces can define their own sector-specific or regional rules, which the framework automatically translates into compliance checks. Coo Roland Fadrany explained: “The Trust Framework provides verifiable identities, compliance mechanisms and digital clearing houses that guarantee sovereignty, transparency and cross-border recognition.” The aim, he adds, is “to make data sovereignty practical and accessible, on the users’ terms”.

But this assessment would not be complete without mentioning the downsides. The first is governance: hundreds of members with divergent interests, including the Big Tech giants, have dragged out the process and dampened its ambition. The release cycles for the specifications have seemed slow compared to the pace of the market.

The second issue is the proliferation of organisations. Anyone wishing to participate in a European data space today is faced with a jungle of acronyms: International Data Spaces Association, Data Spaces Business Alliance, Data Spaces Support Centre, Fiware, Eclipse Foundation. Gaia-X engages with all of them, but the overlap creates confusion rather than clarity.

The third, and most serious, issue is that the European cloud never actually came into being. Gaia-X abandoned the idea of an alternative physical infrastructure to focus on the rules. This is a realistic choice, but it leaves the fundamental question unanswered: who will actually provide the sovereign cloud services on which the data spaces are to rely? The risk is paradoxical — that European regulations will end up governing services that are, in any case, provided by American data centres.

The association refers to the current phase as “Season 2.0”: the transition from pilot projects to deployment at scale, with tools “ready to scale up” towards cross-sectoral ecosystems — from mobility to energy, from smart cities to manufacturing. The network of clearing houses extending as far as Japan demonstrates an ambition that looks beyond Europe.

However, the decisive test remains: the one based on the actual figures. How many businesses will actually share data via the framework, and how much economic value will this generate? Seven years on, Europe has established the framework for digital sovereignty. It has yet to prove that the market is willing to speak that language.