BDVA i-Spaces: key players in the European data and AI ecosystem

Authors: Clara Pezuela (ITI), Till Riedel (KIT)

i-Spaces are cross-sectorial and cross-organisational innovation hubs that bring together data sources, AI technologies, competence-related and all the technical and non-technical aspects needed to allow companies, especially SMEs and start-ups, to get their data-driven and AI-related services, products and applications quickly tested, piloted and exploited. i-Spaces support SMEs and startups across Europe in their journey into the data economy.

The first i-Spaces were established in 2016 and now, 10 years later, the surrounding landscape has changed and i-Spaces are redefining their positioning with respect to the new initiatives in Europe, convinced that i-Spaces have a solid and powerful basis for remaining as a key player in the European data and AI ecosystem.

Today, there are 33 labelled i-Spaces in four different categories (Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze) attending to the level of services they provide, from 21 different European countries. The labels are periodically revised to keep the assessment of the services up to date. All i-Spaces form a federation which allows the interconnexion of local ecosystems of SMEs across Europe and the establishment of cross-sectorial data spaces. The federation of i-Spaces was heavily driven by the EUHUBS4DATA project between 2020 and 2024. Now it requires a new push to position the added value that the i-Spaces concept and the federation as a whole bring to the European ecosystem. In 2026, the Federated Catalogue is being renovated to include all the information about the current list of i-Spaces and provide a central access point to all the provided services.

While many of the i-Spaces are natural parts of a changing ecosystem, we feel the need to explain the relationship between the i-Spaces and the most related ongoing initiatives in European data and AI ecosystem. The table below summarises the intersection of i-Spaces services with the various initiatives, indicating what the i-Spaces can provide to each of them, showing why i-Spaces represent the perfect instrument to leverage on.

How can i-Spaces help and interact with the ongoing initiatives?

Currently, 7 i-Spaces are also AI Factories or belong to consortia, which provide AI Factory services. The i-Spaces have been essential to the design of those AI-factories and will continue to serve SMEs and start-ups within both frameworks. New l infrastructure procured at those AI Factories also serves the infrastructure service that can be provided by these i-Spaces, optimising at most the use and availability of resources for SMEs. This will lead to raising the bar for other i-Spaces. However, through the federation of i-Spaces, this infrastructure (which is accessible through EuroHPC) also becomes available as a backend to other i-Spaces. The federation of i-Spaces provides an established cross-European channel for attracting companies in the use of AI Factory services and infrastructure. Within the establishment of Data-Labs (see below) that can act as a link between AI factories and data spaces, the experience of the i-Spaces will be an important factor in operationalising this link between data and AI that has been at the core of the i-Space initiative since its early beginnings.

The i-Spaces and European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) have a similar mission (facilitate the digitalisation for EDIHs and drive the data economy for i-Spaces) and address the same kind of users: local and regional SMEs and startups. Perhaps, the main difference is the cross-sectorial focus of i-Spaces versus the usual domain-specific focus in EDIHs; and the data and AI-driven technologies in case of i-Spaces, while the technology scope of EDIHs is usually broader. Currently, most of the i-Spaces (24 in total) are also an EDIH, so they can align the services provided through the EDIH and the i-Space to create a critical mass of users and diversify the scope of services and target users. Leveraging on an existing EDIH makes the i-Space more profitable and solid, since the structure and resources are already set up and the label will bring more dissemination and prestige to the EDIH.

One of the usual services provided by i-Spaces is the provision of experimentation environments, which help companies to test data and AI-related solutions, to validate before their adoption, the emerging technologies. This is a perfect match with the purpose of Testing Experimentation Facilities (TEFs), so i-Spaces can rely on TEFs for establishing such infrastructure (currently, 4 i-Spaces are also participating in TEFs) and TEFs could use i-Spaces testing environment to enlarge and enhance their facilities.

Data Lab is still an emerging concept, in development, however, i-Spaces can provide the envisioned services and linkage to data spaces already today. Thus, we recommend leveraging established structures and instruments such as the i-Spaces (and consequently, the EDIHs), instead of creating new entities from scratch. The first Data Labs will be created at the boundaries of the EuroHPC JU, federating AI Factory data services, with only some of them being federated through i-Spaces. However, for those, but also future Data Labs, i-Spaces may become key to scaling those data labs with additional services in a quality-controlled fashion.

The i-Spaces are facilitators of Data Spaces since they can provide data for being shared; training about the data spaces paradigm; testing environments to validate data spaces components and solutions; consultancy about possible business models, legal issues and the process to build a data space; and development of connectors to facilitate the onboarding of participants and interoperability across data spaces.