Frankfurt am Main, 4 June 2020: DE-CIX, the operator of the world’s largest Internet Exchange in Frankfurt am Main, is a founding member of the European data and infrastructure project GAIA-X, initiated by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. This was announced today at a Franco-German ministerial talk. GAIA-X aims to facilitate data sovereignty, data availability, and digital innovation on a European level, and is intended to bundle existing cloud solutions in Europe and produce new approaches to data and infrastructure in accordance with EU standards.
“As the operator of the world’s largest neutral interconnection ecosystem, DE-CIX feels it has a duty to work together with the German Federal Government, other companies, and scientists to create a competitive, secure, and trustworthy cloud infrastructure for Europe. It is important that the method of data distribution and storage is more effectively under the control of the user and the data owner. That is why, together with politicians, we are calling for a European effort to establish sovereignty over Europe’s data – especially production and industrial data. GAIA-X is designed for this purpose,” says CEO of the DE-CIX Group AG, Harald A. Summa, about the foundation of GAIA-X. Summa sees the role of DE-CIX primarily in the provision of DE-CIX’s European infrastructure and its further development into automated interconnectivity services within GAIA-X: “DE-CIX, with its worldwide interconnection infrastructure, is already living the vision of a secure, available, and resilient digital ecosystem. Therefore, an integration of DE-CIX into the GAIA-X system makes sense and is a blueprint for how further interconnection providers can integrate themselves into GAIA-X. This is because, through a connection to the DE-CIX platform, more than 1900 service providers – including data centers, network operators, and Internet service providers, as well as more than 50 different cloud providers, including Microsoft, AWS, and SAP – will immediately become accessible for GAIA-X.”