I do wish EC pulls this off. It would great having an actual home-grown competitor to cloud providers. EU does data protection better than anyone else, this would very much be a symbiotic relationship.
19 companies are involved, including SAP and Orange in the Cloud-Edge Capabilities workstream and Deutsche Telecom in the Cloud-Edge Continuum Infrastructure workstream.
Yeah those names really don't inspire confidence. On the other hand, SAP and Telekom did successfully and quickly implement the corona warn app in Germany back in 2020 as FOSS - so this might result in something eventually.
I'd recommend to just throw the €1.2B at Hetzner with Nextcloud and be done with the European solution.
They wasted millions on the development of an app that is a trivial joke and they still needed several cycles to reach stability. Hetzner+Nextcloud is a cute toy, but has nothing to do with actual cloud infrastructure. 1B is a joke investment when your competitors are Amazon and Microsoft. This money is going to be wasted entirely and there will be zero useful products coming out of it. Exactly like the COVID app
The Hetzner Cloud Server API would actually make a pretty good start for what you call "actual cloud infrastructure", certainly closer to that than NextCloud.