Scaleway, the cloud computing subsidiary of French operator lliad, announced it's withdrawing from the European cloud project Gaia-X. While the company was one of the founding members of Gaia-X last year, Scaleway said it did not expect the project to meet its original goal of helping Europe win back its digital sovereignty.
In a statement, Scaleway said "conflicting interests" were compromising the original goals of the project. As a result, Gaia-X was unlikely to change the current situation of "unfair competition", the company's CEO Yann Lechelle said in a statement. Scaleway prefers to focus on developing its own multi-cloud services, "in order to realise real change and openness", he said.
Spearheaded by the French and German governments, Gaia-X was set up to create an open European cloud infrastructure designed around the needs of local industry and public sector users. While its founding members included major European companies such as Orange, Atos, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, the big American and Chinese cloud platforms Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Huawei have since joined the project as well.
A recent article by Politico.eu flagged internal divisions among Gaia-X members over the interest in involving non-European firms, as well as organisational difficulties getting the project off the ground. Lechelle noted that even if the board members of Gaia-X must be European, they all are customers or have partnerships with the dominant American cloud companies, which may result in conflicts of interest.
