Six New European Providers Join the Virt8ra Sovereign Cloud Thanks to the €3B IPCEI-CIS

This major alternative brings together some of the main Cloud Service Providers across the European Union, including CloudFerro, IONOS, OVHcloud, and Scaleway.

MADRID, SPAIN, May 22, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- 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.

What Virt8ra Partners Say

Virt8ra is bringing together leading European cloud providers to enable distributed use cases on a multi-provider cloud federation. This initiative is set to drive innovation in the orchestration of the cloud-edge continuum by leveraging a diverse ecosystem of European providers.

“We are proud to be part of this project and have the opportunity to collaborate with the European sovereign cloud as an infrastructure cloud provider and a neutral vendor that develops solutions based on open source technologies that drive innovation, flexibility, and independence for European companies and public organizations,” said Alex Etxeberria, CEO of ADI Data Center Euskadi.

“At Clever Cloud, we strongly believe in the principles of openness, sovereignty, and technological independence. We are proud to support the Virt8ra initiative, which fully embodies these values. By championing open source and empowering local providers across the EU, Virt8ra is not only helping to reduce our continent’s reliance on hyperscalers and Big Tech vendors, but also laying foundations for a truly autonomous and innovative digital future. We’re excited to contribute to this transformative journey,” said Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud.

“CloudFerro contributes to Virt8ra by providing computing infrastructure. The goal of CloudFerro’s participation in the project is to enable integration of its OpenStack-based public cloud with other providers. Thus, it will also bring the most established open source cloud software to the mix,” said Stanisław Krzyżanowski, Business Development Manager of CloudFerro.

“We are proud to support the Virt8ra initiative led by OpenNebula Systems, a key project to reinforce Europe’s strategic autonomy in cloud-edge services. As the leading European cloud provider, OVHcloud is committed to promoting interoperable and sovereign cloud services that allow companies to innovate without vendor lock-in and with full control over their data. We believe the Virt8ra initiative will represent an important step forward in this direction and are glad to provide our cloud infrastructure to the stack,” said Caroline Comet Fraigneau, Chief Sales Officer at OVHcloud.

“Stackscale’s involvement in Virt8ra reinforces our commitment to building sovereign cloud infrastructure in Europe. We believe in an open, interoperable model based on European technology—one that allows organizations to retain control over their data and advance their digital transformation with full confidence,” said David Carrero Fernández-Baillo, Co-Founder of Stackscale (Grupo Aire).

About Virt8ra

The Virt8ra initiative, coordinated by OpenNebula Systems, is at the forefront of redefining the management of digital infrastructures in the EU. By providing a flexible and sovereign alternative to restrictive cloud services, Virt8ra enables organizations to regain control of their IT environments. The initiative is a collaborative effort to create a robust, open source platform for managing multi-provider cloud-edge infrastructures, ultimately driving innovation and digital sovereignty across Europe.

Anastasiia Rachkova
OpenNebula Systems
community-manager@opennebula.io
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