Virt8ra, a significant European initiative positioning itself as a major alternative to US-based cloud vendors, has announced a substantial expansion of its federated infrastructure. The platform, which initially included Arsys, BIT, Gdańsk University of Technology,  Infobip, IONOS, Kontron, MONDRAGON Corporation, and Oktawave, coordinated by OpenNebula Systems, has now been joined by six new cloud service providers: ADI Data Center Euskadi, Clever Cloud, CloudFerro, OVHcloud, Scaleway, and Stackscale.

Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud, commented:

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.

Launched in January 2025 by a consortium of eight European tech organizations coordinated by OpenNebula Systems, Virt8ra aims to establish a sovereign and interoperable cloud ecosystem across the European Union. Leveraging the open-source OpenNebula cloud technology, the initiative prioritizes data localization, flexibility, and vendor independence. The initial phase offered compute and storage resources across six EU member states: Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain.

A commenter on Reddit pointed out the broader challenge, stating:

Infrastructure AND the associated software, if I may add! One of the strengths of Azure and AWS, justifying their services, which are 10 times as expensive as those of OVH or Scaleway, is the huge software suite that comes with it. With LLMs and the associated productivity gains, I guess Europe could catch up quite quickly. However, we need to create strong incentives for European companies to switch to European cloud providers.

Just three months later, this expansion significantly broadens Virt8ra’s reach and capacity. Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente, CEO of OpenNebula Systems and Chair of the Cloud-Edge Working Group at the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge, and Cloud, emphasized Virt8ra’s importance as “a key step toward building a sovereign and interoperable cloud ecosystem in Europe.”

Furthermore, Virt8ra is designed to facilitate the easy deployment of distributed applications spanning the cloud-edge continuum, with a strong emphasis on AI and machine learning. The infrastructure is currently being validated through enterprise use cases that demonstrate innovations in AI-enabled orchestration, mechanisms for Data Act-compliant cloud migration and data egress, and the future potential for multi-tenant “AI-as-a-Service” offerings for both inference and training.

In addition, the collaborative effort is taking place within the framework of the Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS). The IPCEI-CIS, approved by the European Commission in December 2023 and supported by 12 EU Member States, represents the European Union’s largest open-source project to date, backed by over €3 billion in public and private funding. Dr. Alberto P. Martí, chair of the IPCEI-CIS Industry Facilitation Group, commented:

I’m proud to see the EU industry finally taking the lead in developing strategic open-source technologies and delivering tangible solutions for creating sovereign digital infrastructure across Europe.

The ultimate objective of Virt8ra is to integrate and validate a European sovereign virtualization stack built around OpenNebula, delivering an open-source, vendor-neutral solution for managing the entire cloud-edge continuum. An objective that might empower EU businesses and public organizations, strengthen their digital sovereignty, and reduce their reliance on non-European hyperscalers and Big Tech vendors.