It pains me that I have to write this, but Gaia-X is a harmful and expensive distraction, and it is not doing anything that will ever get us a “European cloud”, not even indirectly. Its very existence is holding back progress. For this reason, Gaia-X should be abandoned, and we should try to learn as much as possible from its failure, so we can try something else. I provide some inspiration at the end of this post.