Engineering, Italy’s leading company in the digital transformation with an expanding global footprint, through its AVANT project under the EU IPCEI CIS initiative, has joined forces with Fulcrum, a collective of European cloud providers focused on building interoperable infrastructures and services, to deliver a multi-provider federated European cloud

The project comes at a pivotal moment for the European Cloud Computing market, which generated approximately €36 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, with an expected yearly 24% growth over 2024. However, over the past eight years, the market share of European cloud providers has fallen from 29% to 15%, underscoring the need for a new model capable of ensuring technological competitiveness.

This is precisely the goal of AVANT, which aims to facilitate the transition toward a more distributed, open, collaborative, and locally rooted cloud ecosystem — one that connects diverse providers and infrastructures, overcomes market fragmentation, and meets the needs of a wide range of end users across sectors.

Fulcrum brings this vision to life through its federation framework, which connects geographically distributed cloud systems accessible via marketplaces — including one developed by Engineering, which will also contribute additional digital solutions.

The collaboration between Engineering and Fulcrum accelerates the adoption of a sovereign, European multi-provider cloud, fostering interaction between supply and demand and enabling providers to offer their services to end users in an integrated manner. Large and small providers work together to deliver high-quality digital services that are simpler to use and accessible to all.

This model gives all European SMEs the opportunity to access advanced cloud services on favorable economic terms, enhancing their capacity for innovation and integration into global markets.

“Through AVANT Engineering aims to prove the effectiveness of federated distributed cloud resources. Not only does this offer a sovereign and flexible alternative for our project participants, but also brings together European SMEs to offer seamless, secure, and competitive European cloud services,” said Giovanni Frattini, Technical Manager at Engineering. “This collaboration turns key principles of transparency, interoperability, and sovereignty into a real-world deployment, ensuring data is secure, systems can work together seamlessly, and European organizations retain full control over their information.”

“The integration of Fulcrum’s framework as an agile test bed for Engineering’s IPCEI CIS project means both parties can iterate faster, validate against live environments, learn more, and get to market more quickly,” said Emile Chalouhi, Fulcrum. “Our approach creates a federscaler model, using open-source software and designed to boost Europe’s competitiveness and support alternatives to global hyperscalers whilst bridging grassroots innovation and large-scale European policy objectives.”

Supported by CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers of Europe), the project is a lighthouse initiative for European collaboration in cloud infrastructure.

“This partnership shows that a truly federated European cloud isn’t a dream - it’s happening,” said Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General of CISPE. “Instead of copying the centralized hyperscalers’ model, we are federating many providers under one open framework-creating a new kind of collaborative, sovereign cloud that builds on the skills and capacity Europe already possesses to compete at scale.”

About AVANT

AVANT is the project launched by Engineering as part of the IPCEI CIS (Cloud Infrastructure and Services), a European strategic initiative aimed at developing next-generation cloud infrastructures and services. It aims to deliver cutting edge digital services, including digital twins, cognitive clouds and advanced AI and analytics to five key sectors of economic and social importance (industry, energy and utilities, smart communities, cultural heritage and healthcare).

About Fulcrum

Fulcrum is a fast-moving coalition of European SMEs at the forefront of building open-source distributed sovereign cloud infrastructures to create ‘Federscale’ solutions. By creating the technical, commercial and legal foundations that allow cloud infrastructure service providers to pool resources and capacity, Fulcrum aims to create viable alternatives to hyperscale clouds whilst preserving sovereignty, proximity and local control. It will also provide a fair and accessible marketplace for specialist European service providers to achieve scale and reach customers across the continent and around the world.