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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.

  • Programme

    Opening remarks

    Marina Kaljurand MEP and EIF Steering Committee Chair

    Speakers

    Laura Balke, Policy Officer, DG CNECT, European Commission

    Manuela-Andrea Pohl, Head of Public Affairs at United Internet AG

    Dr. Kim Nguyen, Senior Vice President of Innovations, Bundesdruckerei

    First Respondent

    Michal Kobosko MEP and EIF Steering Committee Member

    Exchange of views with the participants under the Chatham House rule

Practical information

23 September 2025 12:30 - 14:00

European Parliament
Members' Salons
Rue Wiertz 60
Brussels
Belgium

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Speakers

  • Marina Kaljurand MEP, EIF Steering Committee Chair
  • Michal Kobosko MEP, EIF Steering Committee Member

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