The European Commission and a consortium led by Telefónica unveiled EURO-3C, a €75 million program funded under Horizon Europe to build a federated pan-European infrastructure integrating telecom, edge, cloud and AI capabilities. Officials announced the initiative in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress 2026, positioning the project as part of the EU’s Digital Decade 2030 strategy to strengthen secure and sustainable digital infrastructure.
EURO-3C deploys more than 70 edge and cloud nodes across 13 European countries, operating in production environments. The architecture connects multiple operators and cloud providers under an interoperable framework designed to support secure, high-performance digital services. Target sectors include automotive, transport, energy and public safety, where low-latency processing and sovereign data control are critical. The platform incorporates AI-enabled orchestration to manage distributed compute and network resources across participating domains.
The consortium includes more than 70 entities spanning telecom operators, cloud providers, industrial firms, SMEs, universities and research institutes. Participants include Vodafone, Ericsson, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and OVHcloud, alongside research organizations such as Fraunhofer and IMEC. The project centers on three pillars: federation across operators and vendors; pan-European industrial collaboration at scale; and nine validated use cases designed to demonstrate commercial applicability and scalability.
• €75 million budget funded under Horizon Europe
• More than 70 edge and cloud nodes across 13 countries
• Federated multi-telco, multi-vendor architecture
• AI-enabled orchestration across distributed infrastructure
• Nine production use cases in automotive, transport, energy and public safety
• Participation from operators, cloud providers, SMEs, industry and research centers
Renate Nikolay, Deputy Director General at the European Commission, said: “The European Commission strongly promotes secure digital communication infrastructures made in Europe, aiming to make the most of telco-edge-cloud convergence, with and for AI. The EU-funded project EURO-3C announced today federates the efforts of a very large number of European players around a common goal: to build a secure and sovereign convergent communications landscape, for the benefit of industrial sectors supplying and using technology, and for society at large.”
🌐 Analysis: The €75 million EURO-3C budget contrasts sharply with the scale of private-sector investment announced at the same event, including the €33.7 billion expansion by Amazon Web Services in Spain. While U.S. hyperscalers and neocloud providers deploy tens of billions of euros into centralized AI and cloud infrastructure, EURO-3C reflects a coordinated European strategy focused on federation, interoperability and sovereignty rather than capital scale. The initiative underscores Europe’s effort to balance digital autonomy with industrial collaboration as AI infrastructure investment accelerates globally.
