Structura-X Starts as Lighthouse Project

The fragmentation of the cloud market in Europe is going to end: 28 European digital providers are launching a joint Gaia-X initiative around trusted infrastructure services. The first Gaia-X-compliant cloud offerings are forecasted by the middle of this year.

Structura-X wants to build a Gaia-X-compatible cloud infrastructure in Europe that coexists with existing services such as those offered by global hyperscalers. In coordination with the Gaia-X Association, seven European providers initially agreed on the common goal: Atos, Aruba.it, DE-CIX, Deutsche Telekom, Engineering, Noovle and TOP-IX. In the meantime, other companies from all over Europe have joined. Today, 28 digital companies from ten countries are part of the federation.

Structura-X complements the industry-specific initiatives for the automotive sector (Catena-X), agriculture (AgriGaia) and finance (EuroDaT), which have already been launched as the first Gaia-X support federations.

Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Gaia-X, says: »Structura-X is an important milestone in Gaia-X's development. The Federation is intended to be the first example in the field of infrastructures. We want to create value and competitive advantage from the fragmentation typical of Europe through the power of federation.«

Structura-X invites other cloud service providers to participate. The common goal of the initiative is to bring together existing infrastructure services in an ecosystem for European data sovereignty and create an overarching European cloud infrastructure. Users will be able to test and deploy their services and data spaces in a Gaia-X approved infrastructure.

Structura-X will work closely with Gaia-X, which among other things will define the technical framework for data sovereignty. At the same time, Structura-X will enable the scalability necessary for new cross-sector and cross-national collaboration in the cloud. The previous fragmentation of the European cloud market will thus be overcome.