Gaia-X project doesn't have a future, claims Nextcloud boss (www.theregister.com)

Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek has publicly declared that Europe’s Gaia‑X initiative “doesn’t have a future” as originally envisioned. Launched in 2020 to build a federated, “trustworthy” data infrastructure and preserve digital sovereignty, Gaia‑X was meant to link cloud providers via open standards so customers could mix and match storage, compute and services. Karlitschek says the project was effectively hijacked by large US hyperscalers after they joined without meaningful voting constraints, using their resources to shape de‑facto standards, flood working groups with documentation and dominate rule‑making—leaving smaller open‑source players like Nextcloud unable to participate at scale. The critique matters for the AI/ML community because interoperable, sovereign cloud fabrics are crucial for data sharing, model training, and compliant multi‑cloud deployments. Technically, Gaia‑X has produced a Federated Cloud Services Catalogue (500+ services) and certification standards, but it failed to deliver the hoped‑for reference implementation or centralized marketplace that would let small providers deploy compatible stacks quickly. That gap turns standards into checkbox certifications rather than practical, deployable interoperability, raising risks that vendor‑led standards and big cloud procurements (e.g., major EU contracts with hyperscalers) will undercut European sovereignty goals and constrain choice for ML infrastructure and data governance.