EuroStack Foundation: Europe's Tech Industry Founds Sovereignty Initiative
With the EuroStack Foundation, European tech companies aim to reduce dependence on US cloud providers in particular.
(Image: heise medien)
Leading European technology companies have founded the EuroStack Initiative Foundation to advance Europe's digital sovereignty through coordinated industry actions. Founding members include Frank Karlitschek of Nextcloud, Andy Yen of Proton, Achim Weiss of IONOS, as well as representatives from Ecosia and other companies. The foundation will be led by economist Cristina Caffarra.
The foundation is a response to Europe's growing dependence on non-European technology providers. As the initiative states in its founding announcement, over 300 CEOs now support the EuroStack, which was launched at the beginning of the year. The founders emphasize that regulation alone is not enough—Europe must build and coordinate its own technological infrastructure.
Three Pillars: Purchasing, Selling, and Financing
The foundation focuses on three core areas: “Buy European” aims to align public procurement of digital technologies more closely with European providers and to combat “Sovereignty-Washing.” “Sell European” focuses on the technical integration of existing European solutions into an interoperable stack. The third pillar, “Fund European,” aims to catalyze private and public investment in digitally sovereign technologies.
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An official side event for the Franco-German Summit on Digital Sovereignty will take place in Berlin on November 17. The foundation plans to develop its governance model and establish working groups for technical integration and procurement in the coming weeks. The initiative sees itself as a long-term project to translate European digital sovereignty from theory into practice.
The announcement of the founding of the EuroStack Initiative Foundation is available at iX. We will update the report as soon as it is publicly available.
How can companies and authorities free their IT from dependencies on US hyperscalers, American or Chinese AI providers, and software manufacturers? Experts from politics, business, and science will discuss this on November 11 and 12 at the IT Summit by heise in Munich. You can find lectures and speakers in the IT Summit Program. On the first day of the conference, there will also be a free workshop which shows how open-source solutions can contribute to digital sovereignty and cybersecurity. Book your ticket now.
At the same time, the EU has introduced a new evaluation system, the so-called Cloud Sovereignty Framework, with which cloud services will be evaluated according to uniform sovereignty criteria in the future. The framework comprises eight concrete objectives covering aspects such as data control, protection against foreign legal access, supply chain transparency, and technological independence. Cloud providers must demonstrate with the SEAL evaluation system that their services meet these criteria, with both technical and organizational evidence required. However, the Cloud Sovereignty Framework immediately faced sharp criticism: it would cause confusion and even favor US providers.
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