The business magazine reported on Friday that the EPO had an agreement with the grand duchy for the “outsourcing of its data centres”.

“Negotiations have been held with Luxembourg and an agreement has been found,” a document on the EPO website reads. It justifies its decision by the need to protect the “inviolability of the archives”, a responsibility enshrined at European level.

The archives will not only includes traditional data but all correspondence, documents, manuscripts, photographs, films, recordings and data contained in computers. The body has not yet communicated publicly about the project. Paperjam suggested that an announcement would likely be made once legislatory changes had been made.

Data embassy

In 2017, Luxembourg signed an agreement to establish Estonia’s first “data embassy” in the grand duchy in early 2018, with Estonia allocating €2.2 million for a five-year rental agreement.

The virtual embassy is located in a data centre in Betzdorf and will be operated by the Luxembourg government’s centre for information and technology (CTIE). The same data centre is used by the European Commission and Nato, among others.