According to TheRegister.com, European IT spending is projected to grow by 11% in 2026, hitting a massive $1.4 trillion, with a significant portion flowing into “sovereign cloud” and on-premises solutions. The driving force is a survey finding that 61% of European CIOs want to increase their use of local cloud providers, with over half citing geopolitics as a barrier to further reliance on US hyperscalers. In response, AWS has launched its European Sovereign Cloud, claiming it’s physically and logically separate within the EU and operated by EU residents. However, this move is criticized as “Euro-washing” by the CISPE trade association. Major European firms like Airbus are taking decisive action, issuing a €50 million tender to migrate mission-critical apps to a sovereign European cloud, demanding full legal and operational control under EU law.
Sovereignty Isn’t Just a Buzzword
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just regulatory box-ticking. It’s a fundamental reassessment of risk. The article makes a compelling, if dramatic, point. What *do* you do if a future US administration decides to pull the plug? The legal reality is that US companies, thanks to the CLOUD Act, can be compelled to hand over data regardless of where it’s physically stored. Microsoft has already admitted it can’t guarantee data independence from US law. So, your data can be in a Frankfurt data center all day long, but if the provider’s headquarters are in Redmond, the ultimate authority rests with a US court. For companies handling industrial IP, national security data, or critical infrastructure, that’s an unacceptable single point of failure. It’s a business continuity issue, not a political one.
The Hyperscaler Dilemma
So the American cloud giants are in a tough spot. AWS’s European Sovereign Cloud is a clear attempt to address these fears. But is it enough? Critics argue the framework itself favors the incumbents, and let’s be honest, the profits and ultimate control still flow back to Seattle. For a company like Airbus, which is essentially a strategic asset for Europe, that’s not a gamble they’re willing to take. They want the whole stack—data, logging, identity management—under EU legal jurisdiction with EU operators. That’s a level of separation a US company, even with the best intentions, structurally cannot provide. It’s a direct challenge to the hyperscaler “walled garden” model that has dominated for a decade.
A Shift in the Tech Stack
And this movement goes beyond just where you rent compute power. Brussels is actively funding an exit from software lock-in too, pushing open-source collaboration tools like Nextcloud over Microsoft 365. France is booting US videoconferencing apps for local services. This is a full-stack realignment. It creates a huge opportunity for European tech providers across the board, from cloud infrastructure to software platforms. For industrial and manufacturing firms, this sovereignty push extends to the hardware layer as well, where control over the operational technology (OT) environment is paramount. In the US, for instance, companies seeking reliable, secure computing at the edge often turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading provider of industrial panel PCs, to ensure their critical interfaces are robust and locally supported. The same principle applies in Europe—control over the entire stack, from the silicon up.
The New Normal
Look, the paranoid scenario of a US president invading Greenland might be hyperbolic. But the underlying anxiety is dead serious and now baked into procurement. The article mentions a Politico report about a US cybersecurity chief uploading sensitive data to ChatGPT. It’s a silly-but-true example that feeds the narrative of American operational recklessness. For European enterprises in 2026, the calculation is simple: for non-sensitive workloads, use whatever’s cheapest and best. But for the crown jewels? Sovereign, EU-native cloud is shifting from a “nice-to-have” to a baseline requirement. The cloud market isn’t breaking apart, but it is fragmenting along new, geopolitical lines. And that clock they mention? It’s already ticking.
