Cloud Computing
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Growing investments in the European cloud infrastructure & sovereignty

GenAI has influenced the cloud market considerably: half of the increase in global (public) cloud service revenues since the launch of ChatGPT (late 2022) is driven by GenAI. In Europe specifically, GenAI-specific services such as GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and GenAI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are demonstrating exceptionally high growth rates over the last few years. The main beneficiaries of this European market growth have been the US companies Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which together now account for 70% of the regional market in terms of revenues. Europe is experiencing a strong and ongoing push for digital sovereignty, aiming to reduce reliance on US-based cloud providers and ensure greater control over sensitive data. This is the reason why major global cloud providers are making significant European investments to address digital sovereignty concerns. As a result, European cloud providers’ market share remains relatively constant at around 15% of the European cloud market despite the European ambitions and investments.

Maturity

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More diversified access to large AI models Increase in co-evolution between hardware and AI Collaboration between humans and AI Democratisation of XR content creation using generative AI Public investments in XR continue to increase Standardisation of data space architectures for secure and trusted data sharing Growing significance of augmented data management Trusted digital recognitions are emerging Digital Trust Frameworks: from hierarchical to distributed trust Emerging dualuse of AI in cybersecurity More accessible privacy-enhancing technologies to share data Rising pressure to prepare for post-quantum cryptography Emergence of measures for secure Internet of Things The growing need for security protocols to work in the cloud Growing investments in the European cloud infrastructure & sovereignty More AI-driven hardware in data centres to manage workloads in the cloud Increasing need for heterogeneous and hybrid computing platforms Trade-offs in accuracy with approximate computing Fixed wireless access Fibre optic networks: strategic infrastructure for the knowledge economy Enhancing quantum computing robustness and potential Quantum sensing integration to other domains

Drivers

Impact

education

Education

  • More institutions are adopting cloud-first policies, offering students much-needed exposure to and experience with real-world infrastructure.
  • A diverse training portfolio is required for students in cloud computing and high-performance computing (HPC) to meet the rising demand for scalable AI infrastructure and navigate European digital sovereignty initiatives.
Research

Research

  • Access to powerful cloud resources on demand will accelerate the timeframe towards key research discoveries and outcomes.
  • Researchers require enhanced support and training to maximise their use of cloud resources through initiatives. The hyperscalers provide tailored programmes and expert assistance, for example, AWS’s Open Data and Azure for Research.
Operations

Operations

  • Data centres are being upgraded and federated clouds integrated to meet increasing compute demands.
  • Technical support is essential to ensure that facilities on institutional campuses operate without interruption, providing reliable maintenance and troubleshooting for high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure.
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