On 20 and 21 November, Porto's iconic Alfândega building hosted the Gaia-X Summit 2025 under the theme ‘Digital Ecosystems in Action’.
This is the most important annual event organised by Gaia-X AISBL, and its sixth edition was held in partnership with Gaia-X Hub Portugal, the TICE.PT Association, the Porto Digital Association and the Porto City Council.
The reception session featured speeches by Gaia-X AISBL, the TICE. PT and the Porto City Council, while the opening session of the Summit was attended by the Portuguese Secretary of State for Digitalisation, Bernardo Correia, Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, France (recorded video) and Thomas Jarzombek, Parliamentary Secretary of State, Federal Minister for Digitalisation and Government Modernisation, Germany (remote participation).
Over almost two days, more than 400 experts from 330 different organisations from 36 countries in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Oceania and Africa presented and discussed their ideas and perspectives on the new phase of development of Data Spaces.
Unsurprisingly, Portugal was the country with the largest representation, with almost 90 participants, the overwhelming majority of whom were from companies not associated with Gaia-X. It should be noted that the next most representative delegations were those from France, Germany, Spain and Belgium.
In the session reserved for Portuguese projects, TestBed Espaços de Dados-X (Data Spaces TestBed) and the ATE and TEXP@CT Agendas were presented, all projects funded by the Recovery and Resilience Programme.
In the session reserved for National Hubs, the activity of the Portuguese Hub was highlighted, and the challenge to the national ecosystem for greater mobilisation around the work promoted by Gaia-X Hub Portugal, coordinated by the TICE.PT Association, was renewed.
At this Summit, the formal launch of Gaia-X Trust Framework 3.0 – ‘Danube’ was announced, an innovation that introduces domain and geographic extensions, allowing trust to be federated across different ecosystems and compliance regimes. With the launch of the Danube version, Gaia-X provides the technical basis necessary to implement trusted data spaces and support Europe's ambition to build sovereign, interoperable and AI-ready digital infrastructures.
