This major alternative to US vendors brings together some of the main Cloud Service Providers across the European Union, including CloudFerro, IONOS, OVHcloud, and Scaleway.
— Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente, CEO of OpenNebula Systems and Chair of the Cloud-Edge WG at the EU Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud.
“Virt8ra represents a key step toward building a sovereign and interoperable cloud ecosystem in Europe, leveraging the OpenNebula open source cloud technology to ensure data localization, flexibility, and vendor independence”
In January 2025, a group of eight European tech organisations—Arsys, BIT, Gdańsk University of Technology, Infobip, IONOS, Kontron, MONDRAGON Corporation, and Oktawave—coordinated by OpenNebula Systems— launched the Virt8ra federated infrastructure, the first sovereign edge cloud in Europe. The initial phase of this pan-European initiative, aimed at providing portability and interoperability across multiple cloud providers, offered computing and storage resources in six EU Member States: Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain.
Now, just three months later, six new cloud service providers—ADI Data Center Euskadi, Clever Cloud, CloudFerro, OVHcloud, Scaleway, and Stackscale—have joined the Virt8ra federated sovereign cloud. This growing infrastructure will keep integrating more geographic locations and a broader range of resource providers, with a focus on offering on-demand hosted instances for Artificial Intelligence.
Virt8ra will support the easy deployment of distributed applications across the cloud-edge continuum, especially AI workloads. The new infrastructure is being validated through a set of enterprise use cases, demonstrating key innovations in AI-enabled orchestration, facilitating Data Act-compliant cloud migration and egress mechanisms, and enabling in the future the deployment of multi-tenant “AI-as-a-Service” offerings for inference and training.
This unique collaboration is taking place within the framework of the Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS), approved by the European Commission in December 2023 and supported by 12 EU Member States. With over €3B in public and private funding, the IPCEI-CIS represents the largest open source project in the history of the European Union, marking a major step towards digital sovereignty and innovation in Europe’s cloud and edge ecosystem.
The ultimate goal of the Virt8ra initiative is to integrate and validate a European sovereign virtualization stack—built around OpenNebula—that delivers an open source, vendor-neutral solution for managing the cloud-edge continuum. By relying on European technologies, Virt8ra aims to empower EU businesses and public organizations and to strengthen their digital sovereignty, reducing their current dependencies on hyperscalers and Big Tech vendors.
The Virt8ra infrastructure represents a critical first step toward building a European alternative for deploying next-generation, ultra-low-latency use cases—such as smart trains, remote surgery, connected vehicles, smart factories, and wildfire management—on top of a distributed computing continuum that spans from 5G cell towers to cloud providers and AI Factories.
Read the full press release here.
Funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service through the ONEnextgen Project (UNICO IPCEI-2023-003), and co-funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU through the RRF.
0 Comments