Empowering European Cloud Sovereignty: Cloud Data Engine’s Role in the CISPE Gaia-X Digital Clearing House

Context

As Europe accelerates its efforts toward digital sovereignty, CISPE and Gaia-X have launched a foundational initiative: the Gaia-X Digital Clearing House. This platform enables cloud users to easily select and purchase services that are verifiably compliant with Gaia-X's rigorous policy framework. By offering a trustworthy marketplace of interoperable and sovereign cloud services, the Clearing House is set to become a cornerstone of Europe’s federated digital ecosystem.

Challenge

One of the major hurdles in achieving European strategic autonomy in the cloud was ensuring transparent, standardized, and scalable verification of service compliance with Gaia-X labels. This required both technological and governance solutions to collect, validate, and disseminate conformity data across diverse providers and offerings—without creating new lock-ins or adding friction for users.

Solution: Cloud Data Engine (CDE)

Cloud Data Engine (CDE) played a pivotal role in enabling the technical backbone of trust and interoperability for the Clearing House.

As a deeptech company specializing in distributed compliance infrastructure and verifiable data exchange, CDE provided the framework and integration capabilities necessary to:

• Structure and automate the collection of compliance data from cloud providers;
• Enable the issuance and validation of verifiable credentials in line with the Gaia-X 24.11 Release Compliance Document;
• Ensure that service declarations could be securely and transparently published, searched, and selected by customers in real time;
• Facilitate interoperability across heterogeneous environments and systems, aligning with Gaia-X’s vision of a federated, portable cloud ecosystem.

Leveraging its unique expertise in data spaces, decentralized identifiers, and compliance orchestration, CDE helped transform the Clearing House from a concept into an operational trust layer for the European cloud.

Impact

Thanks to the collaboration between CDE, CISPE, and Gaia-X:

• Hundreds of cloud services are being progressively listed with certified compliance credentials;
• European customers—public and private—can now procure with confidence, knowing that services meet sovereign standards on security, privacy, and portability;
• The Clearing House is projected to feature over 1,000 compliant services by Q3 2025, driving adoption and encouraging institutional buyers to demand Gaia-X compliance in procurement processes.

Looking Ahead

CDE continues to support CISPE in scaling the Clearing House initiative, contributing to its roadmap for onboarding more providers and automating compliance updates. Beyond infrastructure, CDE advocates for embedding Gaia-X labels into procurement culture, echoing CISPE’s call to add €20 billion in value to the European cloud economy through demand-side pressure for trusted services.

This project showcases how Cloud Data Engine is enabling concrete progress on Europe's digital sovereignty objectives by turning policy into operational infrastructure. Through innovation, interoperability, and a strong commitment to open standards, CDE is helping build the trust fabric for Europe’s next-generation cloud ecosystem.

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