Gaia-X Association
Gaia-X is an international nonprofit association under Belgian law that develops common rules for sharing data and using cloud services in Europe. Its full name is Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL, and its stated mission is to create the de facto standard for federated and trusted data and infrastructure ecosystems.
The members of Gaia-X are cloud and IT providers, user companies, research institutions, start-ups and business associations. Together they write the Trust Framework, a set of rules and software that checks automatically whether a participant and its cloud or data services meet the agreed requirements. Accredited Digital Clearing Houses run these checks, and national hubs bring the needs of their countries into the work.
Trust Framework and label levels
The Gaia-X Trust Framework automates the verification of participant identities and the validation of their credentials, so a buyer can check what a provider states about a service before relying on it. At the Gaia-X Summit 2025 in Porto, the association presented release 3.0 of the framework under the name Danube. This release lets data ecosystems automate their own sector or regional rulebooks and still stay interoperable with each other.
Cloud services can also carry a Gaia-X label, and Level 3 is the highest of these levels. At the same summit, the provider Cloud Temple presented its Gaia-X Label Level 3 as evidence that its cloud service is secure and interoperable.
Digital Clearing Houses
A Gaia-X Digital Clearing House, GXDCH for short, is the place where a participant gets verified against the Gaia-X rules and receives its compliance result automatically. The clearing houses form a network of execution nodes for the compliance software that Gaia-X develops, which the association describes as a distributed trust network without a single point of failure. Nine organizations operate a clearing house, among them the cloud association CISPE, the providers Aruba, OVHcloud and T-Systems, and the data space company deltaDAO.
Members, fees and board
Gaia-X admits cloud and IT providers, research institutions, start-ups, end users and associations as members. The annual membership fee depends on revenue and ranges from 1,000 euros for start-ups and nonprofit organizations to 75,000 euros for companies with revenue of 10 billion euros or more. A logo membership for 750 euros is open to firms that use an accredited clearing house and offer at least five Gaia-X compliant services, without voting rights or a seat in the working groups. Full members also get access to the courses and certificates of the Gaia-X Academy.
The General Assembly of all members elects the Board of Directors for two years, and Catherine Jestin of Airbus chairs the board for the 2025 to 2027 term. The board also includes Susanne Dehmel of Bitkom, Jérôme Léger of Crédit Agricole and Alberto Di Felice of DIGITALEUROPE, next to representatives of SAP, OVHcloud and Orange. Ulrich Ahle is chief executive officer of Gaia-X and leads the management board together with the chief operating, technology, financial and marketing officers.
Upcoming fintech and finance events in Belgium
Hubs in European countries
Gaia-X hubs are national contact points for companies, research institutions and public bodies that want to take part in the project. When the association elected its first board in 2021, hubs existed in 19 European countries. Each hub connects stakeholders within its country and across sectors, collects use cases and works with the association on requirements, so that national initiatives do not duplicate each other. A business committee of Gaia-X gathers the needs that come from the hubs, the lighthouse projects and the data ecosystems.
Gaia-X Summit
The Gaia-X Summit is the yearly conference where the association presents new releases and members show their data space projects. The 2025 edition in Porto was hosted with Gaia-X Hub Portugal and Porto Digital and ran under the title Digital Ecosystems in Action, with separate theaters for technical, economic and partner sessions. Bernardo Correia, Secretary of State for Digitalization of Portugal, and Thomas Jarzombek, Parliamentary State Secretary at the German digital ministry, were among the speakers. Gaia-X members get free access to the summit and the other flagship events of the association.
Where the project stands
The economic ministries of Germany and France announced Gaia-X, and the association was founded in January 2021 with 22 founding members. Today Gaia-X publishes architecture, compliance and identity documents, and projects in aerospace and the nuclear sector build their data spaces on the Trust Framework. At the General Assembly in June 2026, the board reported 65 decisions and 13 meetings in one year. Germany, represented by Robert Heinrich, took over the chair of the Governmental Advisory Board, where European governments and the European Commission advise the association.
Data spaces in finance
For banks and insurers, Gaia-X matters mainly through data spaces in finance, in which several institutions exchange data under shared rules on identity, access and permitted use. Crédit Agricole is the only bank on the current Gaia-X board, and finance firms that buy cloud services can ask a provider whether its service holds a Gaia-X compliance credential. The same questions of control over data and providers come up when a bank plans a sovereign cloud or tests its exit options under the switching rules of the EU Data Act.
Gaia-X and Finance Loop
Finance Loop members who buy cloud and data services for banks ask the questions behind Gaia-X: where data is stored and under which rules a provider may process it. Finance Loop discusses these questions in its Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty track, at events in Frankfurt and other European cities.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.