On June 19, 2025, Visions organised a major European webinar titled “Data, Cloud & AI Federation: Building the Infrastructure of the Future.” More than just an online event, this gathering brought together the key stakeholders of Europe’s digital ecosystem. Cloud providers, AI experts, data space operators, and public institutions were all present. They shared a common ambition: to build a European technological federation. A digital infrastructure that is sovereign, interoperable, and open. This article explores the key moments of the event: live demos, field-tested use cases, and strategic announcements around the Cloud2Space4AI project.
A clear vision: Connecting what already exists
In the opening remarks, Matthias De Bièvre, CEO of Visions, reiterated the foundations of the initiative. Digital services in Europe are still largely fragmented—trapped in technical, legal, or commercial silos.
To rise to the scale of AI-related challenges, we must:
- Create a federation that links existing building blocks
- Facilitate combinations between services
- Offer replicable deployment models across sectors
This vision forms the backbone of a robust, scalable, and sovereign European technological federation.
Real-world use cases across 4 sectors
The event showcased this approach through real-world use cases from various sectors, demonstrating the applicability of a European technological federation in very different contexts.
Education and Employment – Prometheus-X & Edtake
Matthieu Massé, Head of Product and Technology at Edtake, presented a use case focused on automating instructional design through the Skills Data Space. Starting from a syllabus, AI structures learning objects, aligns them with skills frameworks, and recommends reusable resources.
The goal: accelerate the work of instructional designers while ensuring the quality and consistency of learning content.
Smart Cities – FIWARE
Chandra Challagonda, CEO of FIWARE, presented work done with Prometheus-X to develop an interoperable data space dedicated to smart cities. This approach aims to connect various urban actors through a shared, open, and reusable infrastructure capable of supporting public digital services at both local and European scales.
Two projects were highlighted:
- STiDS (Szeged, Timisoara) for predictive traffic management and sustainable mobility
- Geo4Water (Oslo, Valencia, San Javier) for climate, water, and extreme event risk prevention
These projects show how local data, open governance, and interoperable models can be activated through data spaces.
Legal – Legal Data Space
Martin Bussy, coordinator of the Legal Data Space, presented a concrete approach to sharing, enriching, and standardising legal data for AI agents while ensuring exchange confidentiality.
He illustrated how an intelligent agent can automate a company’s legal obligations using a broad range of public, internal, and private data. The Legal Data Space thus enables the creation and deployment of legal AI agents capable of reliably, compliantly, and securely handling administrative tasks.
Culture and Media – DS4Skills, TEMS, TAM
Carole Guirado, European Media Project Manager at AFP, presented a cross-sector case involving three Data Spaces: TEMS, TAM, and DS4Skills. The goal: to leverage interoperability between these data spaces to foster real collaboration between media, audio, and education actors.
This project aims to co-create responsible, traceable, high-value data services and products while exploring new sustainable business models based on sharing, reuse, and ethical content monetisation.
VisionsTrust demo: Service Chains, interoperability, and meta-catalog for a federated ecosystem
In a live demonstration, Matthias De Bièvre showcased the latest developments of the VisionsTrust platform, especially the creation of service chains. This feature allows the linking of multiple technological bricks—data, AI, and cloud infrastructure—to orchestrate complex flows between various providers in a secure and interoperable environment.
He also introduced the VisionsTrust meta-catalog. This federated directory lists offers from multiple data spaces and marketplaces, making them easier to find, combine, and activate. Today, the meta-catalog covers five major domains: health, education, smart cities, legal, and media. It includes three types of offers: data, services, and infrastructures, featuring 13,175 listings from 641 providers and used by thousands of clients across Europe.
This technology foundation is a core component of the Cloud2Space4AI project and the European technological federation it supports.
Cloud2Space4AI: Federating data, AI, and cloud
One of the key highlights of the webinar was the presentation of the Cloud2Space4AI initiative, marking a shift in how interoperability is envisioned between cloud, AI, and data services in Europe.
Rather than creating another centralised platform, the initiative seeks to federate existing providers around an open, modular infrastructure aligned with European standards.
The goal: enable complementary actors to connect their technological components—without lock-in or forced standardisation—in an interoperable environment ready for experimentation and scaling.
Key technology partners involved
Opendatasoft
Jean-Marc Lazard, CEO of Opendatasoft, presented their data marketplace for both human users and AI agents. Their federated hub connects with over 3,000 public and private portals and offers more than 45,000 datasets ready for use in service chains.
Orange Business
Alain Berry, Dataspace Project Director at Orange Business, shared how the company acts as a trusted operator for data sharing. Orange Business provides digital identity services, AI trust guarantees, and cybersecurity solutions. Strong synergies with VisionsTrust are planned, including the integration of tech bricks and co-development of an AI assistant.
Pleias
Anastasia Stasenko, CEO of Pleias, introduced their frugal AI models specialised in data preparation—including anonymisation, structuring, harmonisation, and synthetic data generation—all compliant with the AI Act.
Linagora
Benjamin Bellamy, Business Development Lead for AI Solutions at Linagora, highlighted their 100% open-source generative AI stack. This includes LUCIE (open model, code, and data) and RAGondin, a retrieval-augmented generation engine powered by data space knowledge. These tools are multilingual, privacy-compliant, and deployable in constrained environments.
CleverCloud
Jean-Baptiste Piacentino, VP of Strategic Partnerships at CleverCloud, presented their sovereign cloud solution for developers, based on a “git push” model that enables automatic deployment and scaling. CleverCloud also provides a plug-and-play connector to easily link any application to a data space, while ensuring compliance with European standards (GAIA-X, IDSA).
Cloud2Space4AI is not an isolated project but a growing collective movement. Other partners such as Scaleway, Advaneo, and Pontus-x are currently joining the initiative. The ambition is clear: to offer a credible and operational European alternative for building, step by step, a federated infrastructure that supports tomorrow’s projects on a continental scale.
The “Data, Cloud & AI Federation” webinar shed light on an unprecedented convergence between technology, institutional, and industry players around a shared vision: building a modular, sovereign, and interoperable European technological federation.Concrete demonstrations, multi-sector use cases, and strong partner commitments confirm that this vision is now within reach.
If you missed the live event, the replay is available below.