Several European technologyamong which are the Spanish Arsys and Mondragón Corporationhave joined together to develop and launch virt8ra, the European Union’s first sovereign edge cloud. It will be an infrastructure focused on offering portability and interoperability between various cloud providers, and for now offers computing and storage resources, for now, in six EI countries: Germany, Croatia, Slovenia, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland.
The other six technology companies participating in the project in addition to Arsys and the Mondragón Corporation are BIT, Gdańsk University of Technology, Infobip, Ionos, Kontron and Oktawave. Another Spanish company is responsible for coordinating the project: OpenNebula Systems.
This collaboration has been developed in the context of what is known as IPCEI-ICIS (Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services). Approved by the European Commission in December 2023, it has the support of a dozen EU member states.
As part of the virt8ra integration cluster, there are already more than 30 European companies defining an open source stack for virtualization that is capable of offering a vendor-neutral “made in Europe” solution to manage the cloud-edge continuum. The IPCEI Cloud, in whose financing more than 3 billion euros have been invested, is the largest open source project in the history of the European Union.
This implies that the virt8ra infrastructure is only the first step towards the development of a European alternative for the deployment of next-generation use cases, which require very low latency, on a continuous platform that covers everything from 5G communications towers to cloud providers, passing through data centers. The technologies used for the development of virt8ra are chosen and developed so that EU companies and public organizations can strengthen their digital sovereignty and reduce their dependence on hyperscalar and large technology companies.
The current version of the virt8ra infrastructure has, among other functions, interoperability and portability. Thanks to this, it allows you to manage physical resources, as well as virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters from a single control panel. In addition, applications deployed on top of it can easily be launched, run and migrated between different points and cloud providers.
The virt8ra infrastructure will progressively incorporate more locations and advanced functions to meet the evolving needs of the cloud market. Among these functions, features and possibilities will be the Deploying distributed AI applications at the edge. Furthermore, in line with the provisions of the EU Data Law, which will be applicable in September 2025, the virt8ra initiative will offer the open source technological stack to be able to switch without barriers between services of data processing.
