Discover the 8ra Initiative
Shaping Europe’s Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services
The 8ra Initiative is driving the development of a sovereign, interoperable, and secure Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum. With more than 120 partners from 12 EU Member States, the 8ra Initiative fosters open collaboration to create a resilient and scalable digital infrastructure tailored to Europe’s needs.
By promoting open-source innovation, interoperability, and cross-border cooperation, the 8ra Initiative empowers industries, researchers, and policymakers to shape the next generation of cloud and edge computing. Whether in AI, data spaces, telecommunications, or the industrial metaverse, the 8ra Initiative enables groundbreaking advancements free from vendor lock-in.
Explore how the 8ra Initiative is transforming Europe’s digital ecosystem and join the movement toward a truly federated cloud-edge future.
Stay in the Loop
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© metamorworks – stock.adobe.com 8ra Initiative at GITEX AI EUROPE 2026
The 8ra Initiative will be represented at GITEX AI EUROPE 2026 in Berlin, one of the continent’s key forums for digital innovation. A central part of 8ra’s presence will be the panel discussion “From Vision to Reality – Deploying AI Across a Federated Cloud-Edge Continuum” on 1 July 2026.
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© EUCNC 8ra and CISERO at EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026
At EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026, the 8ra Initiative and CISERO will contribute to the discussion on how Europe can build cloud-edge infrastructures that are open, federated and ready for future communication networks.
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© Pēteris Ārājs | © Jānis Kampars “Digital twins should be reusable, not rebuilt from scratch”
Urban digital twins are widely seen as a powerful tool for city planning. Most implementations are developed as stand-alone solutions, which makes them costly and hard to transfer. The DigiTDevOps project takes a different approach. In our interview, Jānis Kampars & Pēteris Ārājs describe how a modular platform built on reusable patterns can simplify how…
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© Andrea Podda, Luca La Brocca, Stefania Pilleri AI WEEK 2026: Bringing the 8ra Vision into the European AI Debate
At AI WEEK 2026 in Milan, the IPCEI-CIS project Villanova brought the 8ra perspective into one of Italy’s major forums for AI, innovation and digital transformation. Across the event, one message became clear: AI is increasingly understood as a strategic driver for business transformation, with a clear focus on concrete use cases and scalable adoption.
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© deimos.az – stock.adobe.com 8ra at AI WEEK 2026: Villanova highlights European digital sovereignty
At AI WEEK 2026, the IPCEI-CIS project Villanova will highlight how the 8ra Initiative contributes to Europe’s digital sovereignty and to the development of an interoperable cloud-edge infrastructure. Villanova focuses on multimodal generative AI models tailored to European languages and regional needs. Meet us at Hall 13/15 at the Innovation Hub CDO stand.
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© CISERO Project CISERO Workshop: Europe Connected – From IPCEI-CIS Results to Deployment
The CISERO workshop “Europe Connected: From IPCEI-CIS Results to Deployment” will bring together IPCEI-CIS project representatives, companies, SMEs, innovation intermediaries and public-sector actors to explore how emerging cloud-edge solutions can be adopted, replicated and scaled beyond the current IPCEI-CIS ecosystem.
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© Plattform Industrie 4.0 8ra at Hannover Messe 2026: Scaling the Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum
The Hannover Messe 2026 has concluded, and for the 8ra Initiative, the week was a clear demonstration that the European Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum has moved from a strategic framework to a functional industrial reality.
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© Ákos Tényi & Antal Kuthy “When data is distributed, AI should work that way too. “
In this conversation, Antal Kuthy, Founder & CEO of E-Group, and Akos Tenyi, who leads E-Group’s Federated AI (FedX)I product line, describe how their Hungarian IPCEI-CIS project FedEU.ai approaches that challenge through federated learning and distributed compute. Instead of moving data, their systems move models and intelligence to where data already lives.
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© Gennady Danilkin – stock.adobe.com “Digital Sovereignty and Edge Computing within European IPCEI Projects: The 8ra Initiative”
This session will explore how the collaborative Edge projects by Corporación MONDRAGON, Arsys, OpenNebula Systems, and Telefónica de España—supported by the European IPCEI-CIS initiative—are contributing to building a sovereign, distributed, and interoperable infrastructure aligned with Europe’s digital autonomy strategy.
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© Erik Langius “Our mission is to move away from closed ecosystems and create a genuinely open European cloud environment.”
Erik Langius works at TNO, the Netherland’s Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, and is the project coordinator for the Dutch IPCEI-CIS project ECOFED. In our interview he explains, in which ways the architectural design of 8ra helps to build a federation that works in a fully distributed way.