[4] Gaia-X started as an initiative by the former German Minister of Economic Affairs, Peter Altmaier, and his French counterpart, Bruno Le Maire, in 2019.
Originally presented at the 2019 Digital Summit in Dortmund, Germany, the initiative is under the von der Leyen Commission of European strategic autonomy[5] and is under continuous development.
It aims to develop a proposal for the next generation of data infrastructure for Europe, and promote the digital sovereignty of European users of cloud services.
The stated goal of this digital ecosystem is to ensure that companies and business models from Europe can be competitive, and share data within a trustworthy environment.
[18] On 12 January 2021, the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) of RWTH Aachen University in Germany announced the implementation of a secure, decentralized, IoT data space based on the Gaia-X model.
[23] A specific joined press conference took place, with both Altmaier and Le Maire, in June 2020 (source: programme), including the announcement, by the 22 Founding Members, of the Gaia-X Association AISBL.
That announcement achieved broad press coverage: Reuters,[24] AFP, Politico,[25] El Pais,[26] Les Echos,[27] Business Insider,[28] TagesSpiegel,[29] and Europe1.
Will Hutton, writing in The Guardian in October 2020, indicated Gaia‑X is part of a wider strategy to tackle the abuse of personal privacy and monopoly status by US‑based tech giants.
They referred to Gaia-X as a possible Trojan horse of big tech in Europe, and made comparisons to the French State-sponsored cloud project Andromeda that had been launched 10 years earlier and which resulted in public funds benefiting large non-European industry players.