Catena-X and OPC Foundation Join Forces to Enable Seamless Industrial Data Exchange for the Digital Product Passport

Scottsdale (AZ), USA / Berlin, Germany, August 19th, 2025 – The Catena-X Automotive Network e. V. and the OPC Foundation have announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate standardized, cross-company data sharing across the manufacturing industry. The partnership focuses on supporting the upcoming EU regulation requiring a Digital Product Passport (DPP) by 2027, which demands trusted, machine-readable product data across entire value chains.

This cooperation brings together two powerful ecosystems:

• Catena-X, the first open, globally trusted collaborative data space for the automotive industry, offering multi-tier collaboration via sovereign, standardized data-sharing, based on interoperable infrastructure and semantic templates, and
• OPC Foundation, the largest organization for industrial interoperability and the creator of OPC UA, the internationally recognized standard for secure and semantically enriched information exchange.

By aligning OPC UA’s proven industrial modelling capabilities with the governance framework and cloud-based infrastructure of Catena-X, the two organizations aim to simplify data integration, reduce reporting errors, and enhance compliance with emerging regulatory demands like the DPP.

The parties agree to cooperate in the following four core areas:

• Semantic Integration: Combine the OPC UA information modelling and Catena-X semantic templates to create the most comprehensive repository of interoperable, machine-readable models. This technology backbone will also support automated DPP generation from production data.
• Open-Source Reference Implementations: Jointly develop and provide open-source reference implementations for key dataspace and interoperability components, enabling straightforward integration of OPC UA-based systems into the Catena-X data ecosystem.
• Reference Architecture Alignment: Align the OPC Foundation’s Cloud Initiative reference architecture with Catena-X’s dataspace architecture to enable streamlined deployment from the shopfloor to the supply chain.
• Industrial Ecosystem Enablement: Empower companies to leverage their existing OPC UA tools and infrastructure to meet emerging regulatory requirements, particularly the DPP, while reducing integration costs and accelerating time-to-compliance.

“The OPC Foundation provides rich, secure, and proven access to standardized information – an essential foundation for digital transformation. By linking these assets to the Catena-X ecosystem, we turn standardized information into cross-company value. This collaboration benefits both ecosystems and marks a key step toward end-to-end data chains, at global scale, and cross-industry solutions, like the Digital Product Passport.”, says Oliver Ganser, Chairman of the Board at Catena-X.

Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director of OPC Foundation, continued “This collaboration brings together two strong ecosystems: OPC UA, as a globally accepted standard for industrial interoperability, and Catena-X, as a pioneering data-space initiative for the automotive industry. The combination of proven standardization and sovereign data exchange provides companies with a practical bridge from the shopfloor to the cloud. Catena-X contributes significant added value—particularly in meeting regulatory requirements such as the Digital Product Passport and enabling cross-company use of data models, which is also a key pillar of the OPC Foundation’s Cloud Initiative. Together, we are building a robust foundation for sustainable and efficient digitalization.”

About Catena-X

Catena-X is the first end-to-end, multi-tier collaborative and open data ecosystem for the automotive industry, connecting all players along the value chain. The Catena-X association acts as a neutral governance to enable standardized, interoperable, and data-sovereign collaboration, as well as to drive innovation, increase efficiency and compliance across the entire data ecosystem. Catena-X is compliant with international data space standards and serves as a model for all Manufacturing-X initiatives by shaping the development of standardized data ecosystems in other industries. Founded in 2021, the association has hubs in the USA, China, Spain, Sweden and France, with more than 300 individuals from various players in the automotive industry, working in more than 40 expert groups to develop future standards. For more information about Catena-X, please visit https://catena-x.net/.

About the OPC Foundation

Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation’s mission is to help industry vendors, end-users, and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation is dedicated to providing the best specifications, technology, processes, and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, and reliable interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation serves over 1010 members worldwide in Industrial Automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industrie 4.0, Building Automation, machine tools, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and Smart Energy sectors. For more information about the OPC Foundation, please visit http://www.opcfoundation.org.

For more information, contact:

Thomas Obermeyer
Catena-X Automotive Network e.V.
thomas.obermeyer@catena-x.net

Stefan Hoppe
OPC Foundation
Stefan.Hoppe@opcfoundation.org