Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

> This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight‑up national economic security play.

The woes of LLM contrasts…

In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for European companies and should make everyone consider the implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.

I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.

And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US.

And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.

Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering.

There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.

Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper!

One of our domains is due for renewal in a couple of months. I'm setting up the transfer to a EU registrar for it next week.

This all takes time and it's not the most important thing for the bottom line, but on the long run I'm sure I'll look back and say it was a great investment.

As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?

I kind of share the opinion of the FSF Europe that it is less important where software comes from compared to whether it’s libre, but for cloud hardware I really hope that we manage to create competitive European offerings. Maybe we’re lucky and this European initiative will produce more than five Fraunhofer institutes and a gift to SAP.

This already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd and market inertia, that stops companies from switching.

I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.

Can Europe build AI datacenters though?

Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs.

That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.

Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025:

    Amazon: $100B
    Alphabet: $90B
    Microsoft: $80B
    Meta: $70B
    Tesla: $20B

    Deutsche Telekom: $1B

I think reductionist opinions about the "Free market" and price competition being the only factor are naive. Culture and trust are major components of a project, and cultural sensibilities and development culture can be a part of procurement decisions.

I worked for a company that chose Tresorit over any other option because it gave them Data Sovereignty, E2E encryption, and most important, it was not American.

There is intrinsic value in being "Not made in America" and data sovereignty is a major issue for a lot of organizations. Just as an American company would be concerned about storing their data in China, the rest of the world is/should be concerned about storing their data in the US.

Aws Gcp Azure have overbuilt, you don't need most of those services to build scalable and reliable infra for large institutions

That was a good article, I don’t usually read The Register.

Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe!

The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible.

In the US media there is an ongoing rhetoric that everything in the US is wonderful and everything in the rest of the world is much worse. I am privileged to have travelled widely so I know what a mostly wonderful and friendly world we live in.

I just use a few EU tech products (Hetzner, Proton, Mistral) but they seem good enough to me.

> 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to increase their use of local cloud providers.

Oof, the company I work for is proudly telling us we've just migrated from a local provider to Azure, and partnered with Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Glad to know that's not the trend everywhere.

I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case".

I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.

However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.

Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.

And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.

On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.

As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...

I’d start with govs. Governments are mostly running Microsoft. Like your and your friends and family’s health, tax, ownership, pension and other data.

AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China.

I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same?

Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe?

The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser known players positioning themselves in this space -- with managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know some examples.

This is not just a sovereignty/security/privacy issue. I genuinely believe that ditching Big Tech will produce genuinely better technology for consumers. Once the monopolists lose their network effect advantage, startups should be forced to adopt more interoperable protocols and foster healthier competition. Big Tech is a cancer, same as any other monopoly.

We recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.

what a strange game of chicken, why xan’t amzn, msft, et al just contain their infra within euro borders and call it a day? after all the word multi in multinational does not oblige companies to stop selling in Europe, or?

A much better goal would be to ditch dependence on a single company and become, as much as possible, cloud provider agnostic. Not that I mind giving US big tech grief -- they earned it in spades.

But if you wrestle your technology chains from one evil master, do not willingly give it to another, even if he looks more benevolent today. My 2c.

For most medium sized business or government agencies, the main reason for cloud providers is that you don’t need the in-house skill.

You can replicate most of their offerings for that target group with open source stuff easy enough, but you will need people to maintain that and those are more expensive.

The time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster, Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well paying jobs

American cloud companies will sell you a sovereign cloud solution but these are still pretty much make you a vassal state

It's called the Cloud Act. If your business wants to keep its production secrets and personal data safe, think again. This has nothing to do with Trump.

Don't fall for the trick of using an AWS EU sovereignty cloud. Amazon is US-based and falls under the Cloud Act. Don't be tricked.

To really understand how complicated is this matter, put into the mix that before AI in Europe there was no shortage of knowledge to have all our cloud services (to the point that a decent part of key infrastructure software is developed in Europe or mainly by Europeans), social networks, ..., but yet it was never strongly wanted. To reach this point, something is really odd with the current US-EU tensions.

This will happen automatically once an EU native cloud exists with comparable pricing. Get on it. No one will pay 10x to store data in Europe.

This poses a fundamental problem for many SaaS providers. How can you guarantee client data aren't sent across the pond when all the app state is held server-side?

The answer is obvious with native apps, where it's standard practice to provide server endpoint details, so client-verified data locality is simple.

I don't really know how this is practically possible in SaaS web apps.

Even if we get the data and an EU cloud we still need chips, operating system, devices.

Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.

As an European, I see no point in swapping one dictator for another, or one IT giant for another. What we need is to mandate FLOSS, push for an interconnected Desktop model rather than cloud+mobile, force ISPs to adopt IPv6 with a static global per host, and incentivize domain name purchases while promoting affordable home servers and declarative solutions that are accessible enough to most people so they can deploy their own services independently.

It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.

incompetent people, making decisions they should have made a decade ago, that will take more than a decade to implement, and will by then probably be just as outdated as this decision is now

First, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing to become free.

There are certain things that would be a pain to do as the platforms we use gives us so much more than just hosting. It means a lot more operational work in our case and loss of certain functionality that has to be reimplemented using some other stack. I don't see it as feasible in the short term, nor cost effective.

I guess those million dollar bribes to the president's inauguration party were wasted

can't wait for my european incorporated company to run on my european cloud servers so I can run my european language models (which will run inference on european english)

Globalism is dying. Unfortunately, peace goes hand in hand with it.

Yes, nice, true.

But sadly, it feels like pigs will be singing Handel's Messiah before Europe's leaders get off their fat asses and actually do anything about their problems.

This is a pipe dream.

Also, Europe loves to impose its draconian internet laws on the rest of the world, if mutual respect for sovereignty is what they want, then they can now learn to accept the constraints of another nation’s cloud environment. Sucks doesn’t it?

States need to sponsor open source to the tune of tens of billions.

Ss the reg points out it's now national security in a deglobalization world.

I got mocked on this site for suggesting it.

But both the EU and the non aligned superpowers need open source hardware and software stacks.

It's all there already. The people did 90% of the work. Llms are here to close feature gaps, identify security issues, port code. They are great at cloning and iterative improvement.

You don't need some radical new idea. And stand up to American companies

And oh jeez, you might get a functioning tech sector of companies. That would be horrible wouldn't it EU.

Proprietary software and hardware/firmware is a weapon these days. This is a US issue as well.

Open source is the key for the entire economic stack of fabrication of computing devices in a weaponized low trust deglobalized multipolar world.

It enabled cooperation, export, multinational companies to make money worldwide

Will they also need to separate from the banking systems? As I understand it, almost every banking transaction goes through a US-based network.

Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid.

There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels".

Let's talk about the other 4 then (excluding the US), with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four.

I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth. The fourth one is Russia.

Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means".

There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.

If China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with politics.

And move to the Lidl cloud?

Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.

If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.

You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.

Sadly the EU leadership is a bunch of professional bureaucrats living in a comfy bubble completely disconnected with the people or reality.

Why now? Why shouldn't have the world reduced its reliance on US tech platforms and services 20 years ago. Or why shouldn't they wait 20 more years.

What did happen?

europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea.

European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds

If Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to look at thew big picture.

1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7 stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in.

2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap energy. Software is almost "the easy part".

3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the previous model.

4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).

I see this differently.

For European citizens and companies the safest option will always be to have their data in the USA or anywhere where European rulers cannot touch it.

The same for Americans, their data should be safest far away from their government.

IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse.

Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner.

China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything.

One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons:

1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and

2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.