Building Europe’s cloud-edge-IoT stack for competitiveness and strategic autonomy
Europe’s digital future depends on its ability to connect technological innovation with real market needs and coherent policy ambition. As Cloud, Edge and IoT technologies increasingly underpin critical sectors (such as energy, mobility, manufacturing and cities), fragmentation across technologies, standards and actors has become a structural risk for Europe’s competitiveness, resilience and strategic autonomy.
CEI-Sphere addresses this challenge directly. Building on the legacy of UNLOCK-CEI, as part of the European Cloud Edge IoT Computing Continuum (EUCEI) umbrella initiative, the project supports the emergence of an open, interoperable and competitive European Cloud-to-Edge-to-IoT ecosystem, fully aligned with Europe’s industrial, digital and competitiveness agenda. At its core lies the premise that Europe does not need more isolated solutions, but coherent, reusable and scalable building blocks that can be deployed across sectors and markets.
To make this operational, CEI-Sphere supports two main large-scale pilots (LSPs), by mapping pilots and actors, developing a use-case catalogue, promoting interoperability through a defined Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms (MiMs) approach. It also supports the development of secure and compliant CEI systems.
A central contribution of CEI-Sphere is the Hourglass Model, which provides a shared reference to understand and discuss the European CEI ecosystem. Rather than a technical architecture, the model acts as an ecosystem canvas, mapping stakeholders against the capabilities they deliver across infrastructure, platforms, standards and applications. In doing so, it clarifies dependencies between actors, highlights where interoperability and standardisation are most critical, and helps align technology supply with market demand and policy constraints. Designed to be dynamic and reusable, the model can be applied early in collaborative initiatives and refined over time as regulation, standards and use cases evolve. Reviewers have recognised this approach as a key differentiator, as it promotes openness, avoids lock-in, and creates space for competition and innovation at every layer of the stack.
In this sense, CEI-Sphere operationalises the vision of EuroStack: strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty not through isolation, but through open standards, federated assets, shared architectures and strong European industrial leadership. Aligning research and innovation outcomes with market deployment, standardisation efforts and policy priorities, CEI-Sphere supports Europe’s transition from experimentation to scale.
Ultimately, CEI-Sphere’s ambition is to develop living resources (such as ecosystem maps, pilot catalogues and toolkits) that evolve with stakeholder input and remain relevant beyond the project’s lifetime. This is how Europe can translate technological excellence into durable competitiveness and strategic autonomy across the Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum.
Connecting policy to practice: from CEI strategy to V2G deployment
This strategic approach is reflected in concrete, cross-sector domains such as Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), where energy, mobility, digital infrastructure and standards converge. CEI-Sphere actively links its ecosystem-level work to the evolving EU policy and regulatory landscape, as discussed during the V2G Leaders Europe 2025 Summit, where a shared conclusion emerged: V2G is moving beyond pilots, and the priority now is scaling through interoperability, investable market conditions and clear benefits for end users.
👉 Explore how EU policies, regulations and frameworks are shaping the V2G ecosystem.