European digital market figurehead pleads to Westminster

European data venture Gaia-X lobbied UK government officials to help build Europe’s data market in a Parliamentary meeting sponsored by an MP who wants Britain to rejoin the European Union (EU). 

Ulrich Ahle, who as CEO of Gaia-X is overseeing the construction of software infrastructure to run Europe’s planned digital single market, presented the case for Britain’s membership to officials from the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT), at a roundtable meeting at Westminster. 

He was backed by Airbus and Vodafone, both prominent members of the Gaia-X association, which was formed by German and French governments to take on US and Chinese might in tech by creating software to join Europe’s fragmented data systems. 

Gaia-X has been trying to build an international alliance for the sake of the big European industrial firms it represents, who see dataspaces to exchange data across vast global supply chains that operate with severely limited communication. 

But differing regimes of digital law have put barriers in its way, stalling connections with Japan, which as one of a few willing non-EU partners has advanced dataspace ambitions of its own. The EU is building its data market on a foundation of legislation intended to uphold “European values” in data exchange. The US, the UK and even some EU member states have repeatedly snubbed Gaia-X’s advances. 

Starting point

Ahle told Computer Weekly that the meeting was a starting point for his effort to determine whether and how the UK might forge ties with Europe’s data scheme. He received no one-on-one meetings with DSIT officials when he came to London but is hopeful that Gaia-X has done enough in the past year to win official backing in the UK. 

Though Gaia-X has stated that it can only work with countries that implement laws equivalent to Europe’s extensive digital regulations, Ahle said that the UK would not need to enact exact replicas of European law to be compatible with its data system. The EU’s Data Act, Data Governance Act and AI Act are essential components of Europe’s digital single market and the dataspaces expected to run it. 

Yet Ahle didn’t know if UK digital legislation was so different from the EU that it would preclude digital ties, saying: “It should be identified [if] there are parts missing, then they would need to be created. If there would be any gap, then this gap would need to be filled. This would be my offer: can we work to do this together? It needs to be decided in the UK whether such an opportunity could make sense or not.”

He likened the task of building ties with the UK to those he was building with Japan, where differences between its digital identity legislation and Europe’s eIDAS stalled attempts to join Euro-Nippon automotive manufacturing supply chains in a dataspace. Japan was now enacting equivalent legislation, while Gaia-X and the Japanese government’s Digital Agency were attempting to find Japanese regulations that could be recognised as equivalent to EU laws in which participants in European dataspaces must comply. 

A senior European Commission official, who asked to remain anonymous, insisted that the UK need not make its digital laws identical to the EU’s just so British firms could join European dataspaces. He would not say whether partial parity was required. But UK firms could not participate in an EU-funded dataspace unless the government joined Digital Europe and contributed to its €8bn budget, he said. 

While Japan has a dataspace strategy of its own, other non-EU countries have been hesitant to adopt Europe’s model. Gaia-X members voted in June to create a General Advisory Board to give non-EU countries a greater say in its affairs. It will be populated initially with representatives of government and industry from the handful of countries willing to join: Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and South Korea. 

Pitching the case

Yet Airbus needs EU dataspaces run in around a hundred countries, Catherine Jeskin, the aerospace firm’s executive vice-president for digital, who is also chair of Gaia-X, told CW last November. It hopes a dataspace it plans to launch in 2027 will establish reliable dataflows with the 10,000 suppliers in its entire global supply chain. Current technologies prevented connections with all but its hundred largest suppliers, Jeskin said. 

“What will take time is onboarding the 10,000 suppliers. How do we demonstrate the benefit to them? It has to be a win-win relationship,” she said. Airbus was promoting the system as a means of tracing materials to comply with European environmental regulations. 

Also pitching dataspaces as a means to trace materials in complex manufactures, NTT Data, computing arm of Japan’s telco giant, said last month that it was establishing a global unit, with an office in the UK, to build dataspaces and, it reckoned, earn £250m by 2030. 

Europe has still to prove the commercial viability of its initiative. AgDataHub, a state-backed dataspace built to exchange data between French farmers, went bust last autumn because it was funding pilot implementations of its system at the farms it was intended to benefit. It ran out of money, the French government withheld further funds, and it was bought out of administration by a startup open source software firm. 

“Eventually, data spaces should be able to sustain themselves and fund themselves. There still needs to be a business model and business participants in the data space to make it viable,” Ilana Kunkel, policy officer in the European Commission’s. (EU’s) digital directorate, told a recent webinar. 

“We do think that they can be sustainable, and they should be sustainable in the long term, as we cannot rely on public funding forever. The timelines are long, none of the deployment actions have been completed…and long-term scalability and sustainability is still a factor to be discussed,” she said.

Out of 11 dataspaces the EU had been building, the most developed were designed to handle genome and cancer data for the health sector. 

The EC has said its datacenters are open to foreign organisations because it believes international dataflows are essential to trade, but only those that “respect EU values and comply with rules and standards”, Miljana Todorovic, an analyst at Brussels research firm Cullen International, said in a written statement, adding: “UK participation in European dataspaces would depend on UK alignment with European frameworks for cross-border data exchange. This could be driven by industry.”

Gaia-X had been trying to get support from Estonia for four years and the UK for two, Hubert Tardieu, inaugural president and advisor to Gaia-X, told CW in November. “With the new government, you should find people who are interested in doing that. We tried but we did not succeed so far. We were expecting the new Labour government would be more open, but it proved not to be so easy,” he said. 

Estonia will become a de facto member of Gaia-X, however, when next year the data exchange software it’s government uses – called X-Road – is upgraded to use EU dataspace technology. 

Some 25 countries across Northern Europe, South and Central America, Africa and Asia will gain some degree of technical compatibility with EU dataspaces when the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions, which runs X-Road, introduces version eight of its software in 2026. 

James Naish MP, who sponsored the Gaia-X meeting, was not prepared to comment. Airbus, Vodafone and DSIT also disinclined to comment. 

Amanda Brock, CEO of open source software industry association OpenUK, who as Gaia-X’s UK representative has been trying to persuade the British government to back the initiative since 2020, and organised the Westminster meeting in an annex of the Houses of Parliament where MPs work, barred Computer Weekly’s entry. She insisted journalists were not welcome.