What is Gaia-X?

Gaia-X has huge ambitions to make the EU digitally sovereign. But is it that easy?

• Gaia-X is a two-year cloud data project that was supposed to be Europe’s answer to the hegemony of US and Chinese cloud companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and more.
• What started as a Franco-German project eventually became a Belgium-based NGO project to ensure digital sovereignty of European cloud service users.
• Gaia-X also plans to promote European values such as data transparency, openness, data protection and security.
• Instead of being direct competition to US and Chinese cloud, Gaia-X plans to link different data infrastructures using open standards.
• It counts well-known companies such as BMW, Airbus, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, Amadeus, Atos, among others as its founding members. There are 22 founding members and 310 in total.
• But two years since the project was announced, only 6% of around 500 German companies have even heard of Gaia-X.
• What’s even more confusing is the Gaia-X alliance making global cloud players such as Microsoft, Huawei, Amazon, Google, Alibaba as full members.
• We take a look at Gaia-X from all possible angles to see if it can really offer a European alternative to US and Chinese duopoly in cloud computing.