Reaching European stars with American clouds: Rooting European digital sovereignty in Gaia-X

Abstract

Gaia-X is an initiative to create a European cloud ecosystem aiming at boosting digital innovation while securing Europe’s sovereignty in a global IT infrastructure. Its clear political objective is to balance the power of non-European cloud providers and strengthen European digital sovereignty in information infrastructures such as cloud computing and data analysis. However, the initiative invited all big American (and Chinese) cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Huawei into the project. The initiative aims at providing a platform of interoperable and approved services obeying to Gaia-X standards and European regulation. Gaia-X wants to change the way clouds are used and designed and to translate “European values” and digital sovereignty into cloud infrastructure.

Gaia-X is not an EU project and its setup, aims, and working structures as well as its strong resonance make it a fruitful object of study to understand a very specific and new form of infrastructure governance and the geopolitical struggles it is dealing with, including the problem of whether to include American hyperscalers in its working groups. Although Gaia-X started with bold claims on digital sovereignty and autonomy, it adopted to the economic and technological landscape of hyperscalers and cloud providers.

This paper will trace how Gaia-X developed and changed and how the initiative struggles to combine achieving their aims and including different interests and non-European actors. The unique setup of Gaia-X leads to several questions: why is Europe governing their cloud sovereignty in that unusual way? How is the initiative organised – since it is a hybrid between a political initiative and self-governed by European cloud companies? How are non-European providers integrated, what problems arise and how successful is this?

These questions will be answered by analysing which governance strategies and forms of agency are enabled and by taking the materiality of the cloud seriously. Empirically, I rely on interviews, technical document analysis and participation in cloud business meetings. I argue that Gaia-X is a European tool to regulate IT infrastructures without using traditional regulation – and to position Europe between the two great cloud powers USA and China. Gaia-X shows a specific model of hybrid governance merging political regulation, self-regulation, and technological regulation.