Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

I see a lot of conversation here about provider feature parity, but my hope is that sovereignty doesn't have to be strictly about the region or company you choose. For me, the strongest form of sovereignty can come at a lower level. That is, running on an open-source stack you can pick up and run somewhere else should you need to. If your data and workloads live on standard Kubernetes with Postgres, object storage and the usual Prometheus/Grafana/Loki, then no single provider (EU or otherwise) actually has you over a barrel. As the article points out, the "AWS Europe is a separate subsidiary" argument does nothing if the software still ships from the USA.

Shameless plug: We started our company[0] on this basis, i.e. managed Kubernetes on bare metal in EU DCs. We run everything on open source tooling, provide DevOps engineering time to our customers' engineering teams, take on the migration risk ourselves, and offer response-time SLAs. So yes I'm biased, but I did this because I do actually really believe in this approach.

So I'd flip it around. Perhaps building a sovereign hyperscaler is the wrong approach. I'd say we need workloads that aren't welded to any one provider in the first place. And open source tools have come a very long way since EC2 first came online.

[0] - https://lithus.eu/

This was not a thing one year ago, but now it is really part of the conversation. In our company the goal is to reduce by two thirds our expenses in digital services by focusing on self hosting and European alternatives. Is it inconvenient? Mildly so, but for most things there are alternatives available once you start looking into them

> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU.

I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.

There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?

It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?

I feel the article is a bit roundabout, but eventually gets to the point: "Sovereignty" is not (mainly) about physical location, it's about which legal entity controls the data and whether or not that entity is subject to US jurisdiction and could be forced to disclose the data to US companies or agencies, in violation of EU law.

Is it really "EU" Sovereignty? And not its member's Sovereignty?

For me (as an EU citizen), sovereignty is about being independent of companies operating under law that I have no control of (can't vote in the US) and is veeery unpredictible (Trump administration). I don't want to wake up one day I find out my bill tripped because of some tax imposed on EU or completely cut off, because the president woke up in bad mood that morning. EU is very fat from perfect, but for me it is still closer to home, and I truly root for any EU company that tries to take on the US behemoths. I moved everything from GCP and AWS to Hetzner, and am moving from Github to Codeberg.

Unfortunately, it's realty hard. The US giants have offerings that no one in EU has and I am investing huge amounts of time into working around them (e.g. Windows and MacOS CI runners on Github - try to get this for free in EU). I'm fine with paying a bit for this, but even then it's a huge hassle to set it up to be able to get CI checks for my projects on Windows/MacOS. And it's not cheap either. I can afford it, but it is still very expensive.

So when is France/Germany going to subsidize a local competitor, say through anchor customers like their militaries

> I really dislike the term because it’s laden with all sorts of militaristic and anti-free movement and all sorts of other problematic baggage

Then call it "Digital Sovereignty" instead. That's what we call it in the Netherlands.

> but it’s the term the industry is using

OK, and? Sounds like it is time to push back. It's like talking about "lower" and "higher" education. Just call it practical and theoretical education instead. Much more descriptive; doesn't talk down to people we seriously need in the coming decades.

If an EU company refuses to play ball with the US, the US can simply compel the company through sanctions, as it is trying to do with ICC judges.

Travel bans, visa/mastercard, debanking, the whole nine yards.

Sovereignty erodes with giving control to outside entities.

I just came to Netherlands for a short visit and oh my god how much better the food is (comparing to Canada mostly).

Please, please stay sovereign.

For start organizations thwt are sponsored by non-SU entities should disclose their conflict of interest!

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Ah yes, EU Sovereignty when a post makes it to the HN front page.

This is such a dumb topic to me - and I work closely to this issue. The blog post talks about criminal surveillance and gag order possibilities - but has no examples of these being meaningfully applied. Eu govt also spies on citizens.

Obviously the true political point is the geopolitical security risk of depending on another country. There's some truth there but really all countries depend on all others and the way to balance it is to use and grow the trading leverage you do have, not trying to shore up your weaknesses.