Ministry: Gaia-X projects have high market potential

Since cloud giants such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft, as well as the big data company Palantir, which cooperates closely with US intelligence agencies, got involved in the large-scale European IT project Gaia-X, even former supporters have been singing the praises of the original Franco-German sovereignty initiative. However, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK) is now sending out signs of life. According to the ministry, all eleven Gaia-X projects funded by the ministry with a total of around 132 million euros "have been completed with application-oriented results".

The funded teams had "developed trustworthy data spaces and smart services for various sectors", the BMWK announced on Tuesday. The areas represented were education, finance, health, construction, mobility, aerospace, maritime and the public sector. The BMWK launched the Gaia-X funding competition in 2021 and entrusted the Federal Network Agency with its implementation in order to promote innovative applications and lighthouse projects. The BMWK attests that the solutions developed have "high utilization potential".

The funded projects range from Autowerkstatt 4.0 for AI-supported fault diagnosis in vehicles to the Cooperants digitalization project for the aerospace sector and "cross-domain networking for critical applications" with Tellus.

The beneficiaries also included the OpenGPT-X team, which published Teuken-7B, a large open-source language model, in November. This was trained with the 24 official languages of the EU. It is specifically designed to meet the requirements of European values, data protection standards and linguistic diversity. Deutsche Telekom has been providing commercial access to Teuken-7B since December.

Ensuring the sustainability of the data rooms

The partners involved also launched various data rooms, for example for healthcare, the construction industry and the education sector. Health-X dataLOFT pursued the goal of making transparent cloud-based applications usable in accordance with Gaia-X standards for health prevention, healthy ageing and clinical care. Team-X has a similar focus. Marispace-X is about a maritime data ecosystem that will allow players from industry, science, authorities and civil society to share and analyze data obtained from the sea on the basis of European standards and values.

Anna Christmann, BMWK Commissioner for the Digital Economy, is "delighted with the success and high market potential of the Gaia-X funding projects". The task now is to "establish the applications and data spaces as widely as possible in practice". Companies, organizations and consumers could use them to exchange data securely. This would enable new business models that always give citizens control over their personal information.

It is important to "prioritize the economic sustainability of data spaces to ensure their long-term viability", emphasized Hubert Tardieu, independent board member of Gaia-X, in November. What is needed are "mature ecosystems" in which participants can work independently without being dependent on ongoing public funding.

(olb)