Eight sovereign European providers, six countries, one federated AI layer - data stays, AI travels

Creating a truly sovereign European data space for AI requires seamless interoperability across a fragmented landscape of national cloud providers and on-premise systems. The core challenge was enabling secure, federated AI without forcing data migration or vendor lock-in. How do you run a single unified analysis when data resides on different infrastructure in Germany, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands - and that data, under GDPR and sector-specific regulation, cannot cross a national boundary? Operational complexity compounded the problem: managing deployments across eight providers with heterogeneous hardware meant either accepting vendor lock-in or facing separate integration work for every provider in the ecosystem.

E-Group deployed FedX within the Virt8ra partner ecosystem of the IPCEI-CIS initiative, establishing a federated processing layer that runs on top of sovereign EU infrastructures. By integrating with OpenNebula as the common orchestration substrate, FedX deploys across IONOS (Germany), Arsys (Spain and Germany), CloudFerro (Netherlands), OKTAWAVE (Poland), OBIT (Netherlands), Kontron (Slovenia), Infobip (Croatia), and Gdansk University (Poland) through a single unified interface. AI travels to the data - models are trained locally at each sovereign site, and only aggregated, anonymous model updates ever cross provider boundaries. Raw data does not move.

The Virt8ra innovation demo validated FedX as a production-capable sovereign European AI platform: eight cloud and edge providers across six European countries, integrated through a single federated processing layer, with no data movement across any national boundary. The deployment proved three capabilities simultaneously - proven interoperability across heterogeneous infrastructure, eliminating vendor lock-in and technical barriers; simplified federated operations through a single unified management platform; and pan-European scalability validated across borders, enabling massive international AI projects while guaranteeing data locality.