Six cloud providers have joined the Virt8ra European sovereign cloud offering.

Following a January 2025 launch, the likes of OVHcloud, Scaleway, and CloudFerro have joined Virt8ra, a sovereign, open source, multi-provider Edge cloud.

The Virt8ra sovereign Edge cloud platform in Europe was launched in January 2025 as a testbed platform in collaboration between Arsys, BIT, the Gdańsk University of Technology, Infobip, Ionos, Kontron, Mondragon Corporation, and Oktawave. It was coordinated by OpenNebula Systems, an open-source cloud and Edge platform.

The platform has now added six cloud providers to its list, including ADI Data Center Euskadi, Clever Cloud, CloudFerro, OVHcloud, Scaleway, and Stackscale. The growing infrastructure intends to keep adding new locations and increase the range of resource providers, focusing on providing on-demand hosted instances for AI.

Virt8ra is the result of interoperability across multiple cloud providers and is available in six European countries: Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain. While adding new partnerships, Virt8ra has not added new locations, despite the likes of OVHcloud also having cloud regions in France and the UK.

DCD has contacted the organization for clarification on its expansion plans.

According to Virt8ra, the plan is to eventually provide a multi-tenant “AI-as-a-Service” offering for inference and training.

The collaboration is taking place within the framework of the Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS), which was approved by the European Commission in December 2023 and is supported by 12 EU Member States. The initiative has more than €3 billion ($3.39bn) in public and private funding.

According to Virt8ra, the ultimate goal of the platform 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.”

This is not the first attempt by local initiatives to create an interoperable cloud platform in Europe.

Gaia-X, motivated by the market dominance of US hyperscalers, was established in 2020 with the goal of creating such a platform.

In 2021, reports emerged that the initiative was suffering "chaos and infighting," and has since taken a new direction.

In 2024, CEO Ulrich Ahle denied that Gaia-X ever planned such a platform, telling DCD “there was maybe the impression that we wanted to create a competitor to the hyperscalers and create our own European cloud. But the real intention in what we are doing is to define policies and rules for Europe based on European values, and these services can also be fulfilled by hyperscalers."

Gaia-X has since become involved in the "Fulcrum" project, which aims to bring together the small and medium-sized cloud providers in Europe and to exploit the wide geographic distribution that is typical of European cloud providers.

In the past few weeks, US hyperscalers have been addressing the issue of US companies’ dominance in the EU, in light of escalating tensions highlighted by local cloud providers as a result of the White House's attacks on NATO, tariffs on the EU, and threats to invade Greenland as justification for moving off of US hyperscalers and onto local platforms.

Both Google and Microsoft have made public statements reaffirming their dedication to EU customers, and the steps they are taking to ensure data sovereignty for those customers based in the EU.

Microsoft’s company president, Brad Smith, notably said towards the end of April in a blog post, speaking of governments, but without saying which he was talking about: "We will always strive to be a voice of reason that promotes mutual opportunities and stable ties across the Atlantic."

Smith added: "Given recent geopolitical volatility, we recognize that European governments likely will consider additional options. Some of these may involve public financing to support European home-grown offerings. We recognize the importance of a diversified technology ecosystem, and we are committed to collaborating with European participants across the tech ecosystem."