The HIGHER project was presented at the TechNexus ICE 2026 Workshop (Interim Communities Exchange), held online on 16 September 2026 and attended by around 30 participants from across the open hardware and sovereign infrastructure community.
HIGHER coordinator, Manolis Marazakis (FORTH-ICS, Greece), gave a 15-minute talk titled “Digital Sovereignty as an Engineering Problem for Cloud and Edge Servers”, opening with the observation that Europe is heavily dependent on cloud and edge infrastructure designed and controlled elsewhere. The debate around this is normally conducted in policy terms, covering jurisdiction, data location and procurement rules, but Marazakis argued that the dependencies underneath are physical and concrete: the instruction set architecture is licensed outside of Europe, server board firmware is unauditable, and the mechanical, thermal and management conventions of the rack are set by consortia and hyperscalers that European projects often join too late, if at all.
Reframed as an engineering question, digital sovereignty becomes something more specific. Can a data centre server be specified end-to-end, on open standards, by people who can be held accountable for it? Marazakis was clear that no single technical domain can answer that on its own. Every boundary between communities carries its own vocabulary, timescale and incentives, and each one needs a deliberate bridge, whether that is an open ISA carried into open rack-scale standards, European silicon presented to globally governed standards bodies, or research prototypes made legible to industrial supply chains. At the edge, he added, composition itself becomes a dependability question, answered by a verifiable chain running from the silicon upward through root of trust, measured boot, hardware partitioning, device attestation and confidential execution.
Where HIGHER stands, and what’s still missing
The talk showed how far the HIGHER project has already taken this, with European RISC-V and Arm silicon running on standards-conformant boards, alongside OCP-aligned management and firmware. Marazakis was equally candid about what remains open: critical IP availability, software readiness, and discontinuities between funding instruments. The talk closed with an open call for edge and industrial deployment scenarios that could stress-test these platforms, for dependability and certification expertise, and for integrators already working within OCP-aligned supply chains.
More information on TechNexus ICE
The workshop was structured around three segments: Bridging between Technology Domains, Managing Complex Technology Integration, and Implementing Dependable Systems. The HIGHER presentation was delivered as part of the first segment, Bridging between Technology Domains, reflecting the project’s role in connecting silicon design, board-level standards and system firmware into a single, accountable stack.
Learn more about the workshop here.