GAIA-X member companies share worldwide 2021, by type

As of March 2021, 212 companies had joined GAIA-X, of which 40 percent are cloud and technical vendor companies. 36 percent are user companies associations, academics, or NPO, while 25 percent are start-ups. 92 percent of these member companies are European companies, and the other companies come from Asia and North America.

What is GAIA-X?

GAIA-X is a project initiated by France and Germany for the whole of Europe to advocate for and develop a common European data infrastructure. First presented to the public at the Digital Summit in 2019, its aims are the development of a competitive, yet efficient and secure federation of service providers for Europe. Specifically, the project seeks to build a digital ecosystem so that companies can share data and potentially build new services as use cases arise. In addition, this ecosystem will also serve as a repository for companies to find domestic solutions rather than relying on tech giants from abroad.

Why does Europe want to encourage the use of domestic providers and services?

In general, the GAIA-X Association strives towards more cloud independence and reduces reliance on big cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This approach concerns the fact that data is subjected to the laws of the countries in which the companies that host and process the data are located. For example, data by a German company that stores it on an AWS server in the United States is subjected to the U.S. CLOUD Act. In other words, companies from abroad do not operate under the same data policies as Europe. In encouraging companies to use domestic services, GAIA-X seeks to regain data sovereignty by ensuring that data that is generated in Europe remains under European data laws.