A major European cloud provider organization has committed additional funding to drive a push towards what it calls “sovereign, Trump-proof cloud services.”
“Many cloud customers, including European public administrations, are concerned that foreign governments have too much power to demand data, impose tariffs and restrict services on the cloud infrastructures they use,” said the statement from CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe). “Customers need options to select Trump-Proof cloud services that rely on 100% European cloud infrastructure and services and are immune from disruption, access, and potential removal by foreign actors.”
Ben Maynard, CISPE’s director of communications, said the goal of the group’s financial commitment of €1 million (about $1.1 million) for open-source software development is to accelerate the Fulcrum Project, an open-source digital exchange enabling European service providers to federate distributed cloud services to match the scale, reach, and capabilities of hyperscale cloud providers. It is not necessarily to encourage all European enterprises to abandon their US hyperscaler relationships, but is more geared, he said, to SMBs and smaller enterprises who want more local options.
“We are not saying to [European] cloud customers that they need to get off hyperscalers, but that you should have a choice. Many will stay with the [US] hyperscalers,” Maynard said. “The fear that we are hearing from our members’ customers is the idea that a US hosted service could be outlawed, could become unavailable, could become more expensive because of tariffs. People are now thinking that it’s a non-negligible risk now, so we have to consider it. There is a concern that it might happen, and that concern is much more likely now than it was six months ago.”
Maynard acknowledged that the €1 million investment “is a drop in the ocean for sure,” but he added that it is additional funding for the two-year-old Fulcrum effort, and the 15 European cloud companies that are members. “It is additive to what they have already done,” Maynard said.
One of the targeted US hyperscalers would be Microsoft, which has already tried to make its operations more appealing for European businesses.
But analysts have questioned whether the Microsoft move truly addresses those European business concerns. Phil Brunkard, executive counselor at Info-Tech Research Group UK, said, commenting on last month’s announcement of the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud, “Microsoft says that customer data will remain stored and processed in the EU and EFTA, but doesn’t guarantee true data sovereignty.”
And European companies are now rethinking what data sovereignty means to them. They are moving beyond having it refer to where the data sits to focusing on which vendors control it, and who controls them.
Responding to the new Euro cloud plan, another analyst, IDC VP Dave McCarthy, saw the effort as “signaling a growing European push for data control and independence.”
“US providers could face tougher competition from EU companies that leverage this tech to offer sovereignty-friendly alternatives. Although €1 million isn’t a game-changer on its own, it’s a clear sign Europe wants to build its own cloud ecosystem—potentially at the expense of US market share,” McCarthy said. “For US providers, this could mean investing in more EU-based data centers or reconfiguring systems to ensure European customers’ data stays within the region. This isn’t just a compliance checkbox. It’s a shift that could hike operational costs and complexity, especially for companies used to running centralized setups.”
Adding to the potential bad news for US hyperscalers, McCarthy said that there was little reason to believe that this trend would be limited to Europe.
“If Europe pulls this off, other regions might take note and push for similar sovereignty rules. US providers could find themselves adapting to a patchwork of regulations worldwide, forcing a rethink of their global strategies,” McCarthy said. “This isn’t just a European headache, it’s a preview of what could become a broader challenge.”
One Spanish software platform, Softonic, agreed that this is going to be a movement that is likely to grow.
“CISPE’s push for European cloud sovereignty comes at a crucial time, as regulatory and geopolitical pressures increasingly shape the digital infrastructure landscape,” said Farouk Merzougui, Softonic’s chief legal officer. “With the EU tightening its regulatory stance on major US tech firms and the US CLOUD Act enabling foreign data access, businesses must consider the strategic implications of their cloud choices.”
Merzougui added that, for European companies, staying with cloud operations fully owned and operated by European interests “is no longer just a matter of choice, but of strategic necessity in today’s uncertain geopolitical environment.”
Forrester Senior Analyst Dario Maisto noted the Euro cloud move is consistent with the trends Forrester has been tracking.
“We have been seeing an uptick in the number of requests from our customers regarding digital and cloud sovereignty. This is not a strategic problem anymore sitting with the board, but rather a very implementational issue hitting the IT department,” Maisto said. “Securing the autonomy, independence, and resilience of the cloud infrastructure is key nowadays as Europe has become heavily dependent on servers that sit in US hyperscalers’ data centers, subjected to foreign laws.”
But Maisto argued that even if a European company places all of its IP on European servers controlled by a European company, that may not necessarily solve the problem permanently.
“Deploying workloads on European cloud infrastructure will only help as long as European providers put sufficient guarantees in place that their organizations will not be sold to foreign companies, which would bring us back to where we are now,” Maisto said.
Maisto also said that the fact that CISPE is embracing open source for this cloud effort is a mixed blessing.
“Open source does ensure portability, but portability isn’t an easy thing to do, and big SaaS vendors are getting away from open source [because of] the risks that it brings in terms of vulnerabilities and monitoring issues,” Maisto said. “SaaS vendors’ APIs are designed to work with the US hyperscalers, and making them work for other platforms is a re-engineering problem, not a simple lift and shift.”
Source:: Network World