In addition to the sharing of rules, are there other fundamental aspects of the Gaia-X project?
I state that it is necessary to better understand what Gaia-X is. One of the normal problems for such an innovative project is the difficulty in communicating it. First of all, it must be emphasized that we represent the voice of the market, we do not have public funding, and this allows us to have a unique autonomy. Our goal is not to have new rules that create walls around European technology, but to create a new generation of cloud that, unlike the current one, is not concentrated within a few large data centers, governed by technologies. non-European, as in the case of hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. That is, Gaia-X is implementing a different, distributed and orthogonal model compared to the hitherto dominant vertical one. There is more. Gaia X is also building software infrastructures. Therefore, not only is it an association to define guidelines and rules, but a project that will create federation services and make them available. It will be open source, we are not building barriers, all cloud providers including Amazon, Google and Alibaba are participating in the project.
What is the timeline to see the first projects implemented?
The implementation of Gaia-X is not fast and simple, many working groups have started, they are working on various aspects. Furthermore, we have funding from governments even if not directed to Gaia X as an association, but to the creation of Gaia X compliant projects. The German, French and Italian governments are creating bids for federated Gaia X services or use cases for using data based on Gaia-X. Some of the most important projects are related to the creation of a new continous computing and will develop, for example, through various tenders for an amount exceeding 150 million. Another important project sees the collaboration of the largest German automotive manufacturers and spare parts manufacturers in order to share production data, reduce repair times, increase quality and cut costs. In addition, there are dozens of calls, involving Gaia-X, which we are gearing up to intercept both at the level of the Commission and of individual countries. There is also a recent call by Mise for an Important project of common European interest (Ipcei), linked to the new Edge computing cloud infrastructure.
Speaking of the Recovery Fund, what boost do you expect from European resources for digitization?