Climate change, geopolitical tensions, interrupted supply chains: Around the globe, manufacturing industries are facing challenges that often take on specific characteristics in individual countries, but nevertheless are based on developments and trends that transcend national borders. Digitalization and the use of data promise to offer solutions to many of these challenges, from reducing the carbon footprint of manufactured products to increasing the resilience of supply chains. This is nothing one company or one country can do on its own. With this paper, the authors hope to contribute to such a collective effort by focusing on one significant piece of the puzzle to “make data work” on a global scale: The creation of a federated, decentralized and collaborative data ecosystem for smart manufacturing via dedicated data spaces. More specifically, the document is intended to help build a common understanding of data spaces, to identify the problems they can help solve and to highlight the technical and organizational challenges that need to be overcome together.