European Sovereign Cloud: Why the EU Can’t Wait

Cloud Infrastructure Is the New Geopolitical Battleground

The competition for technological dominance is no longer confined to trade negotiations or diplomatic summits. Increasingly, it is fought through digital infrastructure — and cloud computing in particular. Building a <strong>European sovereign cloud</strong> is no longer a strategic option for the EU: it is a structural necessity. The alternative is a deepening dependence on non-European actors that poses risks Europe can no longer afford to ignore.

The United States has made its position clear. Washington’s AI Action Plan — introduced under the Trump administration and reinforced since — is explicitly designed to secure American dominance over global technology standards, critical data flows and advanced computing capabilities. China is the primary target, but Europe is far from immune. The risk for the EU is not confrontation but something arguably more insidious: irrelevance, as it becomes a consumption market rather than a sovereign producer of its own digital future.

Why a European Sovereign Cloud Is a Matter of National Security

Entrusting public data, critical services and strategic business operations to foreign-owned cloud platforms carries consequences that go well beyond data privacy. Today, the dominant providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — are American companies subject to US jurisdiction, regardless of where their servers physically sit. As Michele Zunino, CEO of Italian cloud provider Netalia, wrote in an open letter to the Italian Prime Minister in May 2025: those who control the cloud control markets, people and institutions. When that control lies outside a country’s borders, national interests are structurally compromised.

This is not a theoretical concern. Control over digital infrastructure has become a direct expression of geopolitical power — as consequential as control over energy grids or transport networks was in the previous century. Allowing that control to remain in foreign hands is not a neutral technical choice: it is a political decision with long-term strategic consequences.

Three Concrete Risks for Europe

Europe’s current dependence on US hyperscalers exposes it to at least three distinct categories of vulnerability, each with real-world implications for governments, businesses and citizens alike.

• Geopolitical exposure: The US CLOUD Act grants American authorities the legal right to access data held by US-based companies, even when that data is physically stored in Europe. GDPR compliance does not protect against this extraterritorial reach.
• Economic vulnerability: Commercial or political tensions could translate into technology restrictions at short notice — as already seen with semiconductor export controls and the measures imposed on China. Europe has no guarantee of immunity.
• Industrial lag: Without an autonomous cloud base, European organisations are structurally disadvantaged in developing and deploying AI, advanced analytics and automation at scale. The infrastructure layer determines who captures the value.

What Europe Is Doing — and Why It Is Not Enough

The European Union has acknowledged the problem. GAIA-X, the flagship initiative designed to build a federated, GDPR-compliant cloud infrastructure through collaboration between European providers, represents the most ambitious response to date. The concept is sound: a network of interoperable, sovereign cloud services governed by European rules and open to European players. In practice, however, progress has been slow. National divergences, limited political will and the sheer complexity of coordinating across member states have diluted the initiative’s impact.

The underlying challenge is structural. Europe has strong individual national players and genuine technical expertise, but lacks the coordinated industrial strategy needed to compete with the scale and integration of US hyperscalers. Good intentions and sound governance frameworks are necessary conditions — they are not sufficient ones.

Italy’s Role and the Case for Local Champions

Viable alternatives already exist. In Italy, Netalia operates as an independent cloud provider offering secure, high-performance infrastructure that is fully GDPR-compliant and subject exclusively to Italian and European jurisdiction. For public administrations, regulated industries and any organisation where data sovereignty is non-negotiable, providers like Netalia represent a credible, deployable alternative to AWS or Microsoft — not a compromise, but a deliberate strategic choice.

Italy is not alone in this. Across Europe, cloud providers with genuine sovereign credentials are ready to scale — but they need more than a level playing field. They need active policy support, public procurement frameworks that favour them, and coordinated industrial backing that transforms isolated excellence into systemic capability. Without that, the market will continue to default to incumbents.

The Industrial Plan Europe Needs

Building a credible sovereign cloud ecosystem requires decisions that are both bold and coordinated across member states. Incremental measures and voluntary frameworks have shown their limits. What Europe needs now is a coherent industrial policy built on four pillars:

• Cross-border industrial alliances between France, Germany, Italy and other key partners to develop a genuinely European cloud value chain — from hardware and data centres to software and managed services.
• Sustained public and private investment in sovereign digital infrastructure, treated with the same strategic priority as energy independence or defence capability.
• Targeted support for local providers already operating according to principles of technological sovereignty — through preferential public procurement, co-investment schemes and regulatory recognition.
• Stricter data governance rules that establish enforceable barriers against unauthorised external access to European data, closing the jurisdictional gaps that current frameworks leave open.

Sovereignty or Dependency: There Is No Middle Ground

The technological competition is already under way. The United States is pursuing dominance without ambiguity; China is building a closed, self-sufficient alternative. Europe risks being left in between — a large, sophisticated consumer market with no control over the infrastructure that shapes its own economy, security and public services. That is not neutrality: it is strategic dependency by default.

A European sovereign cloud is not a technical project. It is a political choice about whether Europe remains capable of governing its own digital future. The organisations and governments that treat it as a secondary concern will find, in time, that the decisions have been made for them — by others, according to other priorities. For procurement leaders and IT decision-makers operating in this environment, understanding the stakes is the first step; factoring sovereignty criteria into vendor selection and infrastructure strategy is the logical next one.

An Opportunity Europe Cannot Afford to Miss

Investing in a European sovereign cloud is neither a luxury nor a utopian ambition. It is the practical response to a structural risk that is already materialising. The technology exists, the providers exist, and initiatives like GAIA-X have established at least part of the governance foundation. What remains missing is unified political direction, long-term investment commitment, and regulatory frameworks that genuinely put European interests at the centre.

The window for action is narrowing. Either Europe builds a robust, independent digital ecosystem — one that includes credible sovereign cloud infrastructure as a core component — or it accepts a structural dependency in one of the most strategically consequential sectors of the twenty-first century. For IT buyers, procurement leaders and cloud decision-makers, the question is not whether this matters. It is whether their organisations will be ahead of the shift or behind it.

Related reading:

• GAIA-X – Cloud europeo federato
• Netalia – Cloud provider italiano GDPR-compliant
• Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030 (UE)
• Digital Procurement, Cloud and Data: What ICT Buyers Need to Know

Written by

Domenico Monteleone

ICT & Cloud Buyer

I connect data, contracts and operations to make decisions clearer.

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