The European Sovereign Cloud project was born out of an European desire to create a secure, transparent, and reliable platform for data.
How was GAIA-X born ? 
This ambition stems mainly from the effects of a US federal law from the 23 of March in 2018 known as the Cloud Act.This act allowing US authorities to access data stored by US cloud services established in the US or in a foreign state, even on the European territory. The demand for this extraterritorial application of the Cloud Act led to discussions between Germany and France and gave rise to this partnership for the creation of a European sovereign cloud.
What is the purpose of GAIA-X ?
By November 2020, more than 150 European companies are participating in the project. In April 2021, 212 companies are part of it. In short, this project is about creating an infrastructure for secure data exchange based on European standards. The goal is to forge an open and interoperable European digital ecosystem, in which data and services can be made available, collected and shared in a climate of trust between the different actors involved in the process. The idea is to reference on a platform, through a search engine, the European offers of service providers and existing infrastructures, which comply with certain number of barriers (openness, reversibility, transparency) in terms of hosting, storage and processing of data, in order to guide companies in choosing their solution.
What is the status of the project ? 
Any company is invited to collaborate on the project, which to the great surprise of everyone, has allowed American and Chinese companies to infiltrate it. Strong criticisms have come to light on the place of these companies within the project. Scaleway announced in November 2021 that it would not renew its membership in Gaia-X in 2022, partly for this reason. Arnaud de Bermingham mentioned “We prefer to focus on our velocity and on our ability to recruit the best talent rather than wear out the time of our engineers in working groups that are very much in the hands of the dominant players and that make everything go very slowly or be very complex” . At the moment, the European project of a sovereign cloud has not made much progress.
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