Building sovereign infrastructure for Open Web Search: Inside the EEI project
The French eco-responsible infrastructure provider EXAION (therefore the project name EEI) provides GPU-powered computing to the OpenWebSearch.eu project
The OpenWebSearch.eu research project aims to create and maintain an independent, open web search infrastructure, based in Europe. In order to establish powerful, sustainable and reliable Open Web Search services, a robust physical infrastructure is a basic requirement. The servers needed for crawling the web, processing and indexing billions of pages, have to exist somewhere. And where they exist, and who controls them, matters. In this context, the EEI project, funded under the OpenWebSearch.eu project, contributes high-performance computing infrastructure hosted in France, managed by European teams, and operated under European regulatory frameworks.
What EXAION provides
Exaion committed to providing GPU-accelerated bare-metal servers and virtual machines in its data centres. The hardware includes servers equipped with NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs – powerful graphics processing units increasingly used not just for rendering but for the computationally intensive tasks that modern search infrastructure demands, from training machine learning models to running web crawlers at scale.
The company commits to using circular-economy IT equipment – refurbished or second-life hardware – wherever possible, and to deploying open-source solutions in line with the broader ethos of the OpenWebSearch.eu project. All operations comply with GDPR and relevant European regulations.
What was done
The project unfolded in two phases over the course of a year. The first phase (September 2024 to March 2025) focused on setting up the infrastructure: deploying virtual machines, establishing Grafana monitoring systems, and assessing the feasibility of various integration options with the OWS technology stack. Some planned deployments, such as HPC middleware, were deferred because the matching use cases had not yet materialised.
The second phase (April to August 2025) delivered the project’s core objective: deploying and running the MASTODON crawler – one of the crawling components of the OpenWebSearch.eu infrastructure – on Exaion’s GPU servers. The experiment was tested and validated by Prof. Michael Granitzer from the University of Passau, who coordinates the overall OpenWebSearch.eu project. The crawler ran on five virtual machine instances, demonstrating that real OWS workloads can be effectively executed on sovereign European infrastructure.
Why it matters
Data sovereignty is not just about where data is stored but about who controls the infrastructure that processes it. The OpenWebSearch.eu project is designed as a distributed, cooperative infrastructure from the grounds up. Having computing resources available in multiple European locations, operated by different organisations, reduces single points of failure and concentration risk. Moreover, EXAION’s commitment to circular-economy hardware and direct management without subcontractors demonstrates that sovereign infrastructure can also be sustainable infrastructure.
What’s next?
Current ideas involve an extension of the partnership to include high-performance computing use cases with SIMVIA.
Find the full project report here: https://zenodo.org/records/17777285
The project was funded under the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative (Horizon Europe, Grant Agreement 101070014, Call #3).
