Translated from the German original. Read the original in German.
For years I have been carrying around an idea that I kept putting off: writing a paper that makes the case for a European “Digital Airbus” consortium. Over the past few weeks I finally wrote it down – and discovered that I am not alone with the idea.
I studied aircraft engineering, specialising in aerospace. For me, Airbus was never an abstract case study but a living engineering culture – and a lesson in how much political will it took to turn a Franco-German marriage of convenience from 1970 into an equal competitor to Boeing within a few decades. My career took me through the space industry, my own e-commerce agency and eleven years of leading municipal IT in Baden-Württemberg into consulting. Throughout all those years I have seen how much European digital substance there is – and how badly it is held back by the same lack of pooling that paralysed the aviation industry before 1970.
The Draghi report puts Europe’s dependence on digital products and services at over 80%. Despite a sixfold increase in market volume, European cloud providers hold a market share of just 15%. According to Cigref/Asterès, this costs European businesses around €140 billion a year.
If Europe deliberately shifted ten per cent of its annual cloud and software spending with US corporations – as a demand scenario of roughly €26–33 billion in potentially addressable revenue, not as a fixed funding requirement – towards an Airbus-style consortium, that dependence could be reduced noticeably.
Hence my appeal to EU policymakers:
Put forward a proposal for a genuine European digital consortium that pools many of the ongoing initiatives (GAIA-X, IPCEI-CIS, ZenDiS, Sovereign Tech Fund).
Parliament and Council adopt a binding, multi-year funding line from 2028.
Member states contribute national initiatives such as the Germany Stack (Deutschland-Stack) and France’s “La Suite” as building blocks.
Public procurement sets legally sound requirements for portability and security – a Bundestag expert report confirms that an objectively justified preference for open solutions is permissible under procurement law.
Transparent reporting, audited by the European Court of Auditors, avoids the governance failures familiar from Galileo and ITER.
With Airbus, Europe proved that it can forge a global market leader out of fragmented national expertise. What matters is not the availability of resources but the political will to pool them.
You will find the political discussion paper with the full appeal attached below. A detailed strategy paper with the rationale, governance model and phased plan is also available – just ask.
I welcome every discussion, whether in agreement or critical.
The full appeal as a PDF download (version 1.3, in German).
