Doubts about the success of the
European cloud project GAIA-X

In the current issue of the PROSTEP newsletter, we present two market studies that are unfortunately not freely accessible, or only in excerpts. But the published results also have their say. According to a market study by Gartner, 80 percent of the revenue from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in public clouds is generated by the five providers Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei. 

Not a single European vendor is around, although Gartner analyst Sid Nag says regional cloud ecosystems are growing in importance in the face of increasing geopolitical fragmentation and regulatory requirements.

Whether the GAIA-X project, initiated two years ago with political support from Germany and France to give Europe greater sovereignty as a data space, will be one of them is open to doubt. In any case, analysts at Forrester no longer believe that the project will achieve its original goals. GAIA-X has not delivered any concrete implementations and is significantly behind schedule, according to a blog post about the research. While GAIA-X was creating bureaucracies and PowerPoint presentations, local European providers were banding together to build regional sovereign clouds. Some have also teamed up with Amazon & Co. in the process.