At the end of August, Helmut Leopold, Chairman of Gaia-X Hub Austria and Head of the Center for Digital Safety & Security at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, was elected to the new Board of Directors for the 2025–2027 term at the second Ordinary General Assembly 2025 of the Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud (AISBL). This means that Austria, with the AIT, has joined renowned organizations such as Airbus, Atos, Siemens, Dawex, OVHCloud, SAP, Bitkom, and others on the important steering board of the EU industry-led initiative to actively advance the mission of Gaia-X in the future.
The Gaia-X Hub Austria, which is supported by the Federal Ministry for Innovation, Mobility and Infrastructure (BMIMI) and the State Secretariat for Digitalization, now part of the Federal Chancellery (BKA), and coordinated by AIT, sees itself not only as an information hub, but also as an active co-creator of European digital policy. It advises political decision-makers, supports companies in developing sovereign data strategies, and creates concrete entry opportunities for data spaces through real-world test environments and pilot projects.
Austria is one of the key driving forces behind the implementation of Gaia-X in Europe. The Gaia-X Hub Austria was also present at this year's Gaia-X Summit 2025 in Porto and made an important contribution to the discussions on market impact and concrete implementation. The focus was clearly on the next development step for Gaia-X, the transition from conceptual foundations to measurable impact on the market: Gaia-X now provides a clear set of rules for sovereign data exchange and, building on this, available open source software. With the announcement of the release of the open source software “Danube” during the summit, Gaia-X took the important step from abstract principles to operational feasibility. For the first time, policy and compliance rules are available in machine-readable form and can be automatically checked and applied. The built-in extensibility is crucial here – domain and country extensions allow the common rules to be specifically adapted to sectoral requirements and national jurisdictions without losing European interoperability and comparability. This makes trust scalable, interoperability practical, and significantly shortens the path from pilot projects to robust, legally compliant data-based business models in Europe.
The importance of Austria's strong commitment to the European Gaia-X network will be further underscored in the coming year: The Gaia-X Summit 2026 will be hosted in Vienna in the fall by Gaia-X Hub Austria together with Gaia-X AISBL for the European community, sending a clear signal about Austria's active role in the further operationalization of Gaia-X.
Further information will be published on an ongoing basis at https://www.gaia-x.at/.