My conspiracy theory is that the EU is actively trying to create their own cloud through regulation after seeing the economic success from china's internet companies after the great firewall.
This is called "digital sovereignty", and it has been a major topic for OpenInfra foundation and other open source cloud foundations. Open source, and open cloud software, is the way to ensure your data can stay inside your own borders and be governed by your local laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvz2PcHq0yY is one example of folks talking about this, but realistically you can find talks from OpenStack/OpenInfra going back 4/5 years on this topic.
We have plenty of cloud providers, most are on national levels, not international levels.
That's definitely happening. The US does this through massive government spending on American solutions. The EU is only starting to go that route as well.
> EU is actively trying to create their own cloud
Unfortunately, the EU is not nearly coordinated for such a thing. And even if they were, regulation is not what will make it happen. EU is in a crisis of financial (VISA, AmEx) and software services (AWS, MS, Google) being almost entirely provided by USA. They are not going to dig themselves out of the hole by regulation.
For contrast, USA is (largely) dependent on China, Korea, and Taiwan for chips. But they decided to attack the problem by investing several hundred billion dollars to develop their domestic microchip manufacturing infrastructure [1]. This appears to be paying dividends already as TSMC is already producing chips in Arizona, and estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030.
It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act