Good news from Brussels: West­fa­len­WIND IT, a data cen­ter ope­ra­tor based in Pader­born, is a part­ner in a stra­te­gic and inno­va­tive Euro­pean rese­arch project. 

The rese­arch pro­ject, titled “IPCEI — Next Gene­ra­tion Cloud Infra­struc­ture and Ser­vices (IPCEI CIS),” was initia­ted by seven mem­ber sta­tes (France, Ger­many, Hun­gary, Italy, the Net­her­lands, Pol­and, and Spain). Up to 1.2 bil­lion euros in public fun­ding has been allo­ca­ted to the pro­ject. An addi­tio­nal 1.4 bil­lion euros is expec­ted to come from pri­vate-sec­tor invest­ments. Under the IPCEI initia­tive, 19 companies—including small and medium-sized enterprises—will carry out 19 highly inno­va­tive projects. 

“For us, par­ti­ci­pa­ting in this event is like recei­ving a badge of honor—it makes us proud and enables us to raise awa­re­ness of our mission—sustainable digi­tal infrastructures—within the IT indus­try. Most recently, we were able to pre­sent our wind­CORES and our rese­arch pro­ject at the Ger­man government’s Digi­tal Sum­mit in Ber­lin,” says Dr. Fiete Dub­berke, Mana­ging Direc­tor of West­fa­len­WIND IT GmbH & Co. KG. This pride is well-foun­ded, as the large-scale IPCEI–CIS pro­ject invol­ves col­la­bo­ra­tion with major cor­po­ra­ti­ons such as Atos, Sie­mens, SAP, and Telekom. 

The offi­cial pro­ject name, IPCEI-CIS, sounds a bit clunky and, at first glance, reve­als little about the actual initia­tive. The last three let­ters are key: they stand for what the pro­ject is all about—cloud infra­struc­tures and ser­vices. Accor­ding to an offi­cial state­ment from Brussels, the core objec­tive is to bring tog­e­ther cen­tra­li­zed and decen­tra­li­zed com­pu­ting capa­ci­ties from various stake­hol­ders on a com­mon, open tech­ni­cal foun­da­tion. “The par­ti­ci­pa­ting com­pa­nies will deve­lop open-source soft­ware that enables real-time ser­vices with low latency via dis­tri­bu­ted com­pu­ting resour­ces loca­ted close to users, ther­eby redu­cing the need to trans­fer large amounts of data to cen­tral cloud ser­vers,” accor­ding to the EU’s offi­cial press release. 

“Sim­ply put, it’s about a dedi­ca­ted Euro­pean cloud sys­tem that is fede­ra­ted and dis­tri­bu­ted, and in which all par­ti­ci­pants take part,” explains Fabian Löhr, the pro­ject mana­ger in charge. He descri­bes wind­CORES’ role in the pro­ject as fol­lows: “Our role as ope­ra­tors of decen­tra­li­zed data cen­ters in wind tur­bi­nes could be to pro­vide one of the future inter­faces for energy-effi­ci­ent, resource-con­ser­ving, and cli­mate-neu­tral ope­ra­ti­ons.” Because one thing is cer­tain: Accor­ding to the EU, the pro­ject aims to do not­hing less than “advance the digi­tal and green tran­si­ti­ons in Europe.” It is inten­ded to deli­ver the tech­no­lo­gies and solu­ti­ons nee­ded to achieve the digi­tal stra­tegy by 2030: the use of cloud tech­no­logy by 75% of Euro­pean com­pa­nies and the deploy­ment of more than 10,000 super­com­pu­ters across Europe.