The single market for data is not a technical detail, it is a strategic precondition for Europe’s digital sovereignty and AI competitiveness. Europe now faces a clear choice: move beyond convergence through dialogue toward convergence by design. The next step in Europe’s digital agenda is not more principles, but shared market rails that make trusted data exchange possible at scale. Data space interoperability is the missing link between Europe’s commitment to trust and its ambition for scale. Without it, Europe may succeed in creating multiple data spaces, yet still fail to build a genuine single market for data & AI.
“ Turning Data Space islands into a European Data & AI continent.”
Europe needs a ‘GSM moment’ for data & AI: a political and industrial commitment to a minimal, enforceable interoperability core that is common, measurable and reusable across sectors and Member States.
Europe will not win the next phase of the digital and AI economy by copying the raw-scale model of foreign platforms. Its comparative advantage lies in its regulation and partnership culture, and in governed access to high-value private & protected data. But that advantage becomes economic and geopolitical leverage only if identity, catalogues, contracts, semantics and compliance can work across ecosystems at low cost. The real objective is therefore not more data spaces as such, but a Data & AI Union built on coordination without centralisation: many actors, many implementations, and shared rails.
Europe already has the rules and the building blocks. The choice now is whether it remains a power of regulation or becomes a power of implementation. If interoperability becomes a real market condition, Europe can turn trust into transactions, transactions into scale, and scale into strategic autonomy.
« Europe can shift from sovereignty by regulation, to strategic autonomy by shared standards »
Discover the thirteen proposals developed by the contributors to this collective report.
