European digital companies and cloud providers are launching Structura-X, an initiative for shared infrastructure services that meet the requirements of Gaia-X. As part of the lighthouse project, the 28 companies and organizations have agreed to make their cloud services Gaia-X-compliant. Structura-X complements the sector-specific initiatives for the automotive sector (Catena-X), agriculture (AgriGaia) and finance (EuroDaT). The first Gaia-X-compliant offerings are expected in mid-2022.

"Structura-X sets an important milestone in the development of Gaia-X and aims to realize the first example of an infrastructure alliance. We want to create value and competitive advantage from our usual fragmentation in Europe, through the power of interconnection. We welcome the goal of Structura-X to build the 'bottom of our X' - an infrastructure ecosystem - to make the 'top of our X' - the ecosystem of data spaces - work. This in turn will be realized through the other lighthouse projects," explains Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Gaia-X.

The initiative arose from the need to build a Gaia-X-compatible infrastructure in Europe that exists alongside the industry's existing services. 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, so that today a total of 28 Structura-X members from ten countries are part of the initiative. The members agree that they want to use open source technology to offer the services. This also includes interoperability and the realization of security aspects as well as 'privacy by design'.

Max Ahrens, Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Gaia-X, says: "We welcome the initiative of the infrastructure providers. The industrial implementation of the Gaia-X standards by cloud and infrastructure providers is a crucial building block for functioning data sovereignty in Europe."

Structura-X invites other cloud service providers to join in. The common goal of the initiative is to bring together existing infrastructure services in an ecosystem for European data sovereignty and to create an overarching European cloud infrastructure. Users will be able to test and deploy their services and data rooms in an infrastructure recognized by Gaia-X. Structura-X will work closely with Gaia-X, which will define the technical framework for data sovereignty, among other things. At the same time, Structura-X will enable the scalability required for new cross-sector and cross-border collaboration in the cloud. The aim is to overcome the previous fragmentation of the European cloud market.