A major five-year effort to build a technology base for Europe free of U.S. influence foundered amid conflicting national strategies and powerful corporate lobbying.

As Europe’s leaders once again discuss tackling American tech dependence, those involved in the project to build a European cloud warn against repeating past mistakes.

The Gaia-X initiative was “a crushing failure, a colossal waste of time, and just as many years gained for the hyperscalers — in other words, an industrial disaster,” said Yann Lechelle, a former CEO of French cloud champion Scaleway and one of the founding members of the initiative who quit in frustration in 2021, describing it as the “best decision ever.”

The industry-led project was born in 2019 from a Franco-German drive to forge a “European industrial policy fit for the 21st Century” — a rallying cry that brought German and French companies together with top political backing to create a data infrastructure. The endgame goal of Gaia-X, named after the Greek goddess of Earth, was to “establish data sovereignty in Europe” and “counteract monopolistic tendencies.”

As political momentum once again swings behind digital sovereignty, leaders will gather in Berlin on Tuesday to talk about how to become less dependent on foreign-owned technology. POLITICO spoke to both current and former Gaia-X officials, both on and off the record, about the lessons they learned that could prove valuable.

Those conversations illuminated an initiative that failed to help Europe’s own digital ecosystem take root because it was weighed down by politics, bureaucracy and the interference of precisely the American and Chinese tech titans it was meant to challenge.

Despite a fast-growing market for cloud computing services that underpin the internet, the global share of European cloud providers has continued to fall, dwarfed by the dominance of Amazon, Microsoft and Google. One of Gaia-X’s initial success stories, called Agdatahub, which was touted as a triumph for farming data, went bankrupt last year.

“I joined Gaia-X because I believed in the original mission. I left Gaia-X because I didn’t believe it was going in the original direction,” said its former CEO, Francesco Bonfiglio.

Franco-German divides

Misalignment among the founding companies on the mission of Gaia-X became apparent early on, consistent with the traditional divergence in Paris and Berlin over tech sovereignty.

In Paris, sovereignty was about backing local champions and breaking reliance on the U.S., while Berlin focused on protecting Europe without severing important trade ties.

“The influence of political happenings inside the association was evident. Sometimes they were clashing,” said Bonfiglio, describing how it pitted a “historically more protectionist” France against a “fluctuating” Germany.

Everybody “interpreted” Gaia-X as they wanted to, he said. The former CEO described how this divergence in expectations and a lack of a “clear or common” definition of sovereignty — let alone a shared understanding of what it would take to get there — made his task extremely difficult.

“France turned it into a very political issue, whereas the Germans treated it more as a technical matter,” said another founding member of Gaia-X, who is still part of the initiative and was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

The interests were at odds from day one, founding member Lechelle recalled, which was part of the reason the initiative would never deliver “the fantasy of a European cloud Airbus.”

The Germans came on board with the idea to create data sovereignty, by shielding the data of their citizens and industries from foreign snooping and legal control, he said, adding: “Atlanticist as they may be, they were totally fine with the idea of depending on Microsoft.”

Meanwhile, the French pushed a more self-serving vision, hoping to see Europe become self-reliant, from infrastructure all the way to software.

That’s how the mission to create a “federated cloud infrastructure” came to life. But that “staggering complexity” would soon turn into an “unmanageable mess,” said Lechelle.

Current CEO Ulrich Ahle, who joined in 2023, pushed back — saying Gaia-X is far from a “failure.” It has united the industry — both large and small players — around tangible deliverables, such as federated data spaces and compliance labels, he said.

“At the beginning, some people thought that Gaia-X would be the European hyperscaler as the competition to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and so on,” he said, but in fact, “it is more about creating a way to handle data in a European way.”

“The results we’re providing and the real business benefits these interoperable data spaces are creating are more and more visible,” he said, highlighting the example of a data space based on Gaia-X standards that French energy company EDF will use to securely coordinate the construction of new nuclear sites.

Back-door lobbying

As Gaia-X grew and set out to define Europe’s blueprint for secure data sharing, it opened its doors to industry participants from beyond Europe in a bid to push new standards on the global stage.

While board seats remained reserved for EU companies and industry groups, alarm bells grew louder that the project was being hijacked by the very players it was meant to take on.

Those firms “steered the entire roadmap,” Lechelle said, throwing money and people at it. “The committees were drowning. They [global players] had the capacity, the bandwidth, but we were already underwater … Americans have full-time lobbyists and massive budgets. Their job is basically to derail any initiative they don’t like.”

American cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as Chinese tech giants Huawei and Alibaba, are all members of Gaia-X. In 2021, the annual summit in Milan was sponsored by Huawei and Alibaba, prompting backlash.

Some interviewees expressed criticism that the European industry associations and companies on the board were representing the interests of business partners abroad.

“I was struggling against many, many forces that were trying to dilute the rules of verification, dilute the efforts,” said Bonfiglio, stressing he was “the CEO of a consensus-based organization where consensus couldn’t be achieved most of the time.”

Bonfiglio said he didn’t regret opening up the initiative to foreign players. “The problem is not America vs. Europe,” he said, but “trust” or lack thereof. Letting non-EU providers in was supposed to force them to become more transparent, he argued. “You think you’re good, show us what you have,” was his mantra at the time, he said.

He now acknowledges the unavoidable influence of corporate giants in the cloud space. “You don’t need Microsoft, Amazon and Google on the board, because they would be represented by people sitting on the board from European companies. It’s an indirect lobby,” he said.

The current member of the association interviewed for this story said the bylaws of Gaia-X should be changed to kick out industry associations from the board, as they play into the hands of tech giants.

In response, Gaia-X’s Ahle said that “the strategic directions are given and the strategic decisions are taken in the board of directors.”

He touted the initiative’s top-tier certification label — which excludes non-EU companies — as proof that it took decisions that went against U.S. interests. This was something “members like Amazon, Google and Microsoft didn’t like at all,” yet it happened.

Where now

As leaders prepare to meet at the high-profile summit in Berlin to debate how far to go in pivoting away from Big Tech, several of the people interviewed for this piece cautioned against repeating past mistakes.

While European countries have not yet aligned on a common definition of digital sovereignty — something many see as crucial for real progress — there are signs that Paris and Germany are closer on positioning than they were five years ago.

“I admit, I struggled with the term [digital sovereignty] before. I didn’t think it was necessary, but the global situation has changed so dramatically that we Europeans now have to become more sovereign,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Thursday.

At the summit, Merz said, “We’ll explore all the possibilities, together with industry representatives, of what we can do not only to become more independent from China, but also, for example, less dependent on the U.S., less dependent on the Big Tech companies. We want to catch up, we want to improve.”

And yet — with Germany this month celebrating Google’s decision to invest more than €5 billion in building data centers in the country, a move that Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil described as “exactly what we need right now” — the reality of corporate interests may be hard to address.

For Bonfiglio, the lesson from Gaia-X is that ”it is obvious that everybody sitting in the boardroom of an association with such a big and impactful objective tries to protect the interests of their own company.”

While Gaia-X may have missed its shot at delivering on its big, original ambitions, Lechelle insists the upcoming Franco-German summit is “a chance to put a finger on the sore spots.”

In the meantime, “those who wanted to maintain the status quo have won.”