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PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:20260430T090719-12257877@secretariat@internetforum.eu
DTSTART:20250923T123000
DTEND:20250923T140000
DTSTAMP:20260430T090719
SUMMARY:Stronger together: federating Europe’s digital infrastructure
DESCRIPTION:Today, Europe’s digital infrastructure landscape is fragmented, as EU providers are generally much smaller when compared to the infrastructure giants of the US or China. This fragmentation means that for large-scale or complex workloads, sometimes only a handful of (non-European) solutions are available, which raises concerns regarding market concentration, strategic autonomy, and risks of vendor lock-in. This event will explore the concept of federated infrastructure models, especially for cloud, which is increasingly seen as a practical approach to strengthening Europe’s infrastructure capacity and offering. The idea is to create the conditions for providers to interconnect their services at various levels (data centres, networking) enabling more resilient, scalable, and flexible infrastructure without requiring consolidation or costly and time-consuming investments. Federated systems would not merely ‘copy’ the success formula of large foreign providers but would create a truly European model with its own competitive advantages. For example, they would have superior ‘capillarity’, since they would be composed of a multitude of small (edge) data centres as opposed to a handful of large ones, which would be attractive especially for actors seeking to run latency-sensitive workloads. On the other hand, such solutions are by default built on open standards and open source software, meaning that they would guarantee interoperability and protection against vendor lock-in. The concept of federated cloud was recently supported by Member States, in their input to the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (WK 5272/2025 INIT), as well as the Parliament, in the ITRE Committee’s own initiative report on technological sovereignty and digital infrastructure (2025/2007(INI)). Moreover, in recent months, several private sector initiatives have reached important milestones, with the release of the Fulcrum project’s core, and the publication of the SECA API by Aruba and IONOS.
LOCATION:European Parliament, Members' Salons, Belgium
TRANSP:OPAQUE
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