European Data Union Strategy
Summary
The strategy will establish a simpler, coherent EU framework for secure, large-scale data sharing between businesses and public administrations to power AI. It will align and streamline existing rules and practices, strengthen cross-border interoperability, and embed robust safeguards for confidentiality, integrity, security and IP. Concretely, it will: promote common technical and semantic standards (e.g. schemas, metadata, APIs); enable trusted data intermediaries and data-pooling mechanisms; expand access via privacy-preserving methods (e.g. anonymisation, synthetic data, secure processing); and clarify fair, transparent licensing for B2B and public-private data use. Closely linked to AI Factories, new Data Labs will federate sectoral datasets and connect to Common European Data Spaces to unlock high-quality training data at scale.
Action items
Launch first data labs to scale data availability and link to AI ecosystems (Q4 2025). They will also offer trusted pseudonymisation services.
Launching the quality data for AI initiative: expanding high-value datasets under the Open Data Directive (Q4 2026); setting up a stakeholder forum with public broadcasters and AI developers (Q2 2026); making 30 million digitised cultural objects available for AI training (Q4 2026); and launching a crowdsourcing initiative for domain-specific data and language data in smaller European languages (Q2 2026).
Proposal to consolidate data legislation (Q4 2025)
Proposal to update ePrivacy rules on cookies and similar technologies (Q4 2025)
Proposal for targeted GDPR adjustments (Q4 2025)
Launching a one-click compliance initiative (from Q4 2025 onwards)
Rolling out support measures for the implementation of the Data Act (from Q4 2025 onwards)
Issuing guidelines to assess fair treatment of EU data abroad (Q2 2026)
Creating a toolbox to counter unjustified localisation, exclusion, weak safeguards, and data leakage (Q2 2026) and adopting measures to protect sensitive non-personal data (Q3 2026)