A Franco-German project with the aim of becoming a European one: this is how, on Thursday 4 June, the Ministers for the Economy Peter Altmaier (Germany) and Bruno Le Maire (France) presented their joint initiative for a “storage infrastructure and the sharing of company data”, called Gaia-X.
This project represents a real “digital lunar shot”, the German Minister said at a press conference. “We are convinced that this will be crucial, as our economic strength, competitiveness and sovereignty are at stake” he continued, in the hope of seeing an alternative offer emerge to the US cloud computing platform (see EUROPE 12359/25).
A legal entity under Belgian law will be created in the coming weeks and will start in September. The objective of both parties is to launch the first services for businesses at the beginning of 2021.
A safe and reliable marketplace
This ‘cloud’ will function as a marketplace with, on the one hand, a catalogue of services offered by providers who pledge to respect a number of commitments and, on the other hand, companies that will make it possible to avoid excessive dependence.
It will be based on a number of principles such as reversibility (the ability to switch a cloud service from one provider to another), respect for privacy rules, transparency on a number of contractual clauses, openness to stakeholders, etc. With regard to access to data by foreign powers, the Gaia-X project was designed taking into account the difficulties posed by the Cloud Act (which obliges US service providers to comply with US data disclosure orders - editor's note), says a source from Bercy. According to this source, companies will be informed of this possibility and it will be up to each of them to “choose whether they take the risk of being subject to U.S. extraterritorial legislation”.
A project with a European vocation
As it stands, the project brings together a total of 22 companies (11 in Germany, 11 in France), each of which has invested €75,000 as an entry ticket. According to Bercy, the project is open to other Member States and contacts have already been established with the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Spain, Italy and Poland.
The European Commission welcomes such an initiative. “We fully share the Gaia-X project's goal of ensuring Europe's digital sovereignty by building together secure and reliable cloud infrastructures and services”, commented a spokesperson for the institution. In its data strategy it also announced its intention to publish a protocol to avoid the fragmentation of national and/or transnational initiatives (see EUROPE 12418/1). It also plans to launch a European market for cloud services for private and public sector users by the fourth quarter of 2022. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)