Outlook

Three transitions shape the near future: infrastructure becomes geopolitical, data becomes regulated and shared, and AI absorbs the technical stack from end to end.

The cloud is being rebuilt around AI: dedicated chips, inference services, computing gigafactories. The cloud giants are also becoming energy players, signing nuclear or renewable contracts to power their data centres.

After the doctrines come the deeds: SecNumCloud certifications, trusted cloud offers, the EuroStack initiative, an overhaul of the European legal framework. The debate remains open: a legally sovereign cloud or a technologically sovereign one?

The Data Act gives users rights over the data from their connected devices and requires portability between clouds. Sector-specific European data spaces aim to let data flow between trusted parties.

The "everything in the centre" model is cracking: edge computing in factories, vehicles and cities; local AI on phones and NPU-equipped PCs. The future is a continuum in which every piece of data raises a question: where should it be processed?

Serverless, platform engineering, AI agents able to provision and operate infrastructure: the more abstract the plumbing becomes, the more strategic and invisible it is.

The last frontier: AI training data. Exhaustion of high-quality public data, synthetic data, copyright, licences between publishers and labs: "who owns the data?" is becoming a major economic question.