GAIA-X cloud sovereignty project (2020)
France and Germany launched GAIA-X to build a federated European cloud as a counterweight to AWS, Microsoft and Google. AWS, Microsoft and Google were soon admitted as members, and the project never shipped production services at scale. EU providers' share of the European cloud market fell from 26% in 2017 to about 10% by 2020.
GAIA-X became a standards and certification body rather than a working cloud. Germany pulled funding from several pilot projects.
Hyperscalers entrenched their position. Brussels concluded that voluntary federation could not deliver sovereignty, which set the stage for a binding law like CADA.
CADA is the legislative answer to the policy lesson Brussels drew from GAIA-X: federation and labels did not move market share, so the 2026 package leans on hard rules, public procurement and capital.
