Anastasius Gavras
Eurescom GmbH
At Mobile World Congress 2026, the European Commission has announced the launch of EURO-3C, a €75 million initiative under Horizon Europe to build a federated Telco-Edge-Cloud infrastructure for Europe. The project brings together a broad ecosystem of telecommunications operators, cloud providers, technology companies and research organisations with the shared ambition of strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty and industrial competitiveness. EURO-3C will lay the foundation for a pan-European, multi-vendor infrastructure that integrates telecom networks, edge computing, cloud platforms and AI capabilities into a unified and interoperable environment. By federating distributed resources and service offerings across Europe, the initiative will help reduce fragmentation, unlock new digital services and support the growing demand for high-performance, low-latency and secure computing.
Key Challenges
Delivering such an ambitious vision requires overcoming several structural and technological challenges.
One of the core challenges lies in integrating diverse Telco, Cloud, Edge and AI infrastructures across multiple providers. Differences in orchestration frameworks, interoperability standards, performance requirements and operational models create significant technical complexity. EURO-3C will federate these distributed heterogeneous infrastructures and service lines from major EU Telco and Cloud providers into a comprehensive multi-vendor environment; the EURO-3C pilot infrastructure. Within this infrastructure, Telco-Edge-Cloud platforms will provide a sovereign, unified service catalogue that enables openness and interoperability across providers and delivering high performance.
Emerging AI workloads and vertical industry use cases require unprecedented levels of connectivity, storage and computing capacity, which are often distributed down to the far edge. Low latency, high throughput and elastic scalability are baseline requirements for sectors such as Automotive, Transport, Energy and Public Protection & Disaster Relief (PPDR), among others. The project will demonstrate how a federated Telco-Edge-Cloud infrastructure can scale to meet demands, co-designed with stakeholders from these key sectors to ensure real-world relevance and impact.
EURO-3C embeds security-by-design and Zero Trust principles into federated, multi-domain environments, ensuring interoperable mechanisms that protect cross-domain interactions and safeguarding EU’ critical infrastructures and data flows. Resilience, cybersecurity operations and trusted service orchestration are integral components of the architecture.
Scaling Telco-Edge-Cloud services across Europe requires navigating fragmented markets and differences in regulatory frameworks. The ambition is to come up with interoperable and sustainable business models that are fully compliant with EU and national regulation and legislation. Alignment of technological innovation with regulatory clarity, is the foundation of a trusted and competitive European digital ecosystem.
Strategic Objectives
To translate its vision into practical outcomes, EURO-3C has established a set of strategic objectives. At its core, the project seeks to design a robust architectural and implementation pathway toward an open, multi-supplier, and multi-vendor 3CN infrastructure. It promotes openness and interoperability for reducing technological fragmentation and expedite a competitive and innovative European digital ecosystem. A key pillar is the convergence of connectivity and computing through AI-enabled resource integration across Telco, Edge, and Cloud domains. The project will explore how intelligent orchestration and multi-domain federation can transform distributed network and computing resources into a coherent service environment.
Building on this technical foundation, EURO-3C will develop an interoperable, customer-facing service layer that allows seamless cross-domain service delivery. Through intelligent orchestration mechanisms and multi-level federation, the project aims to simplify access to complex distributed infrastructure. The project will integrate AI-enhanced cybersecurity and privacy protection mechanisms, to safeguard data exchanges and service operations across federated domains.
The project targets large-scale operational validation across Europe. It will demonstrate how supply and demand ecosystems can converge to support real-world applications in vertical sectors by deploying capabilities across the infrastructure and validating them through vertical industry use cases. Recognising that sustainable adoption requires viable economic models, the project will investigate business frameworks that support long-term market deployment. These efforts will focus on ensuring that federated Telco-Edge-Cloud services can operate effectively within competitive market conditions and delivering value to ecosystem participants. Finally, EURO-3C aims to contribute to the broader European policy landscape by supporting the development of a more coherent regulatory environment. It will provide input on governance and compliance aspects, and seek to simplify the current regulatory complexity and align technological progress with Europe’s long-term digital sovereignty objectives.
Eurescom’s Contribution
At Eurescom GmbH, we are committed to contribute to this strategically important initiative. With our long-standing experience in organising and supporting large-scale European research and innovation programmes, we are committed to helping ensure the smooth implementation and effective operational set-up of EURO-3C. Managing complex multi-partner environments, facilitating structured collaboration, and ensuring alignment between technical progress and strategic objectives are areas where Eurescom brings substantial added value.
We also extend our sincere appreciation to the Eurescom shareholders and the broader European community of telecommunications operators, as well as equipment vendors, cloud providers, service providers, and major European research institutes, for supporting and helping advance this ambitious effort for the development of the substrate of a strong European digital ecosystem.
Further information
European Commission: “Commission Announces €75 Million EURO-3C Project to Build Federated Telco-Edge-Cloud Infrastructure.” Last modified March 3, 2026. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-announces-eu75-million-euro-3c-project-build-federated-telco-edge-cloud-infrastructure