The 8ra Annual Summit 2026, held at De Doelen (Netherlands) on March 18 and 19, brought together over 250 participants from the IPCEI‑CIS ecosystem on the first day and nearly 500 at the open conference on the second day. This edition confirmed the summit's status as a pivotal event for assessing the progress of the European initiative on digital sovereignty, the cloud‑edge continuum and cybersecurity.
E2CC was represented at the event by a delegation composed of François Exertier (project coordinator); Patrice Calegari (main architect); Patrice Bleuze, cybersecurity expert and recognised contributor to the Cross Workstream on Security of IPCEI‑CIS/8ra, and Antonio Rausell (from the Institut Imagine, the partner in charge for the E2CC\AI4RDP use case on AI for pathogenicity in rare diseases). On the second day, Patrice Calegari presented the official E2CC project pitch as part of a series of project presentations scheduled during the event.
The extensive program covered the four 8ra Workstreams, the evolution of the IPCEI‑CIS ecosystem and the role of its projects in building an independent, high‑performance, energy‑efficient, sovereign cloud‑edge infrastructure aligned with EU strategic priorities.
The summit provided an excellent opportunity to meet with institutional representatives and companies involved in IPCEI‑CIS and other related projects, underscoring the scale and ambition of IPCEI‑CIS, a European initiative backed by €1.2 billion in public funding and €1.4 billion in private investment.
The 8ra initiative serves as a long‑term framework that builds on the results of IPCEI‑CIS and paves the way for future European projects in distributed computing and edge‑AI.
