Europe Working On ‘Gaia-X’ Cloud Platform To Reduce Dependency On US

A new European cloud computing platform ‘Gaia-X’ is under development. A group of 22 German and French companies is looking forward to setting up a legal entity in the coming weeks that would help Europe get rid of its dependency on US companies for cloud services.

According to Reuters, the entity managing Gaia-X platform will be registered as a non-profit firm under Belgian law. Both the German and French Economy Ministers would soon brief the media on the progress of the new initiative.

The targeted timeline for the launch of Europe’s Gaia-X cloud computing platform is early 2021. The companies involved in its development are hoping that the new platform would break the dependency.

If all goes well, Gaia-X might even end up competing with services like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, and IBM — companies that currently dominate the cloud computing and data hosting service domain.

The topic of sovereignty and security has been brought up time and again in both Germany and France as their data is hosted remotely on the cloud servers owned by Silicon Valley giants.

The geopolitical tensions and trade wars between countries are raising alarms for European politicians and companies and they are now cautious about storing data on American or Chinese cloud servers.

Creating a more secure indigenous Cloud environment would not only favor European countries but also falls in line with the Digital Single Market strategy from the European Commission.

The project GAIA-X was conceived in Germany and will be led by Minister Peter Altmeier, who will be the leader of the initiative.

Several companies and research institutions from different countries are currently involved in the initiative and it includes some big names such as SAP, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, and Bosch of Germany and French company Atos, which was previously led by European Commissioner Thierry Breton.