The carriage tracks on the floor of the Alfândega, where the Gaia-X 2025 summit convened for two days, are an immarcescible symbolic reflection of the digital tracks that the Gaia-X project as a whole is accomplishing today and for the future of European technical excellence. In 1320, after much internal conflict, Afonso IV commanded to “fazer o almazém e allfandega” — to create a warehouse and customs house. In 1335 the storage and customs facilities, which would bolster trade, and security were built. This further aligns with the figurative dimorphous stratagem of Gaia-X — to, in effect, bolster digital security and move digital property with ease and function as much as the Portuguese and their great navy as well as merchant ships succeeded in doing centuries ago. From Helsinki to Porto, the data mission is still the same.
Data is now the most powerful competitive, political, and economic asset any organisation or nation can possess. If you don’t control your data, you don’t control your future. Someone else will make the decisions for you. The Europeans are now masters of their own digital entity, and do not want to depend on any other nation, monopoly, or authority regarding its own digital ecosystem. In fact, one suspects the Gaia-X vision is to broadly become the global standard for data compliance and standards.
Looking over the Douro river alongside the Alfândega, one can easily see the similarities of the umbriferous past mingling with the “sunny” future, as is the case within the eternal circumcrescent of time.
Why Data Matters
Data is the new raw material of innovation… through AI, automation and predictive analytics, data is a required element and of course, it must be high-quality data. Through the acquisition of data, one builds intelligence on many levels, and variables.
Data is infrastructure, not exhaust. Most companies still treat data as a by-product or a throw-away piece of rubbish. Winners treat it like electricity or transportation, a foundational system that everything else relies on.
Data compounds. For example, the more data you collect, the more intelligent your systems become, the more users you attract, and conversely — you attract more data.
Data gives you power in negotiations. Whether you’re running a business, a nation-state, or an AI ecosystem, data ownership determines bargaining power. If you don’t have data, you’re a price-taker, not a price-maker.
Data is the choke point for digital sovereignty. This is why Europe is fighting hard for Gaia-X and sovereign data spaces. If Europe doesn’t secure its data pipelines, it will always be dependent on U.S. and Chinese platforms for infrastructure, cloud, and intelligence.
Data is security. Cybersecurity, defence, logistics, supply chains, the interoperability of everything depends on the integrity and availability of data. Lose control of data, and you lose the ability to act.
Data is economic value creation. Value used to come from land, then machines, then software. Now it comes from data-rich cloud-based ecosystems that enable new business models that enable real-time marketplaces, autonomous operations, hyper-personalised products, resilience forecasting, decarbonisation modelling and cross-sector collaboration.
Whoever you are, or whatever you are, you must own, structure, and use your data.
Gaia-X is thus Europe’s attempt to build a shared, trusted, federated, sovereign data infrastructure where companies can collaborate without giving up control.
Through interoperability, systems must be interoperable across Europe. This enables different organisations, clouds, and data systems to plug into each other without friction avoiding vendor lock-in, enabling cross-border innovation, creating EU-wide competition instead of closed silos. Essentially, this is the core of Gaia-X. Without interoperability, the whole project collapses.
Trust is also a major factor for a secure digital Europe. Companies won’t share data unless they’re 100% sure who can access it, how it’s used, that competitors won’t steal it, that governments can’t grab it and that there are no leaks. Gaia-X creates this through strict governance rules, certification, transparency, security standards, legal guarantees and all sorts of other good stuff. Trust should be assured by design — not by assumption.
Europe must remain digitally sovereign. This is a geopolitical strategy as opposed to a technical one. In this respect, Europe wants to control its own data, not depend on U.S. hyperscalers (AWS, Google, Microsoft), Chinese infrastructure, foreign laws like the CLOUD Act.
Through Federation of the data infrastructure, Gaia-X is building the opposite of the Silicon Valley Big Tech “one platform to rule all” model but is instead deploying an uncentralised linked chain with lots of plectile independent systems woven together with each keeping control of its own data but agreeing to shared standards.
Does satire employ data? Sure it does, without the most finite pieces of data collated throughout history and the present, the Daily Squib cannot interpret and see the future. We employ data from every source on the planet as best we can to concoct our infamous “ridiculous” articles that tend to offend multiple sectors and people across the globe, but that’s what we do, and we’re not going to apologise for deploying something that delves into the underlying truth of any given subject — using data.
There is also a caveat to data acquisition on such a grand scale. The data must be used responsibly, or there could be a dystopian taste to what happens in the future. Where people like Yuval Noah Harari who posits that those who control the data streams control society, he subsequently warns that “dataism” (the belief that systems should prioritise data flow above human values) could eventually override liberal democracy. One would question, of course, if the true definition of a “liberal democracy” ever existed, but that is another subject.
Phillip K. Dick on the other hand had a rather negative view on big data where he anticipated a world where digital information distorts reality. His dystopian vision of the future projected that data won’t just describe the world — it will fabricate it. Et voila, we now indeed do have a world where deepfakes, AI-driven narratives, AI Slop, and synthetic realities are essentially Dickian predictions come true. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, even predicts an economy where the human experience becomes a raw data commodity for a “behavioural futures market”.
The global proliferation of robots in homes will be orchestrated at a singular time window and will herald the age of data levels exploding like never before. We cannot write this kind of stuff without mentioning Ray Kurzweil, who predicts the merging of machines with humans some time after the Singularity. Kurzweil essentially predicts that data becomes the substrate of consciousness.
With vast data… what about the Hive Mind? Already, we are seeing the beginnings of this concept in all social media, where these “echo-chambers” of discourse all seem to be saying the same thing, one way or another. This is possibly why our publication is routinely cancelled on many of these platforms because we dare to NOT say the same things that others do. Dificile est saturam non scribere…
Anyway, whatever your opinion, whatever your outlook, whatever your philosophy on data is — we would defend it to the death — for each morsel is a viable valuable piece of data that will be ultimately swallowed up by the big, biggest, bigger data vacuum in the sky. DING! It all got sucked up into the Enormodatavaultcloudthingy. Me? I’m off to the necessarium to unload a huge quantity of unwanted parsed data (curry and beer) into the bowl of inequity.
