Microsoft’s recent admission before the French Senate that it cannot guarantee protection of French citizen data from US government access, even when stored in EU datacenters, has sent ripples through Europe’s digital sovereignty and cloud computing debates. This revelation—a public, on-the-record statement by Anton Carniaux, Microsoft France’s director of public and legal affairs—represents more than just a moment of transparency from a global cloud provider; it signals the acute legal and technological crossroads at the heart of Europe’s sovereignty ambitions, and exposes the vulnerabilities lurking within the infrastructure of governments, enterprises, and citizens alike.
On June 10, 2025, under oath before the French Senate inquiry commission investigating public procurement’s impact on digital sovereignty, Carniaux was asked the question that’s haunted European policymakers for years: “Can you guarantee that French citizen data hosted in EU datacenters by Microsoft will not be accessed by US authorities without explicit French authorization?” His answer was unequivocal: “No, I cannot guarantee it.”
This admission, while astonishing in its candor, shouldn’t be entirely surprising. Microsoft and other US-headquartered hyperscalers—companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud—have long faced legal realities that often contradict their marketing assurances about local data protection. Carniaux referred specifically to the US Cloud Act, a piece of legislation granting American authorities the power to compel US companies to provide data stored anywhere in the world, regardless of local privacy protections. Even as Microsoft emphasizes its technical and contractual safeguards, the testimony carved out the legal bottom line: in the face of a valid US legal request, compliance is ultimately obligatory.
Pierre Lagarde, Microsoft’s technical director for the public sector, provided detail on efforts since 2022 to localize customer data. “Since January 2025, under contractual guarantee, the data of our European clients does not leave the EU, whether at rest, in transit, or being processed,” he asserted. However, as the Senate hearing revealed, these technical and contractual measures are fundamentally limited by extraterritorial US legal powers.
Transparency reports from Microsoft attempt to assuage these fears by showing that no European company has (publicly, at least) been affected by Cloud Act requests in recent years. However, as critics point out, transparency reports may not reflect the full extent of government demands, especially in national security contexts where classified processes are common. Therefore, while the numbers may reassure the public on the surface, the legal vulnerability remains baked into the structure.
Consider the education ministry’s contracts with Microsoft—worth up to 152 million euros—for productivity software used across public schools and universities. While French policymakers tout national independence, these contracts cement dependencies that place millions of workstations, emails, and documents within potential reach of US law enforcement and intelligence.
The “Bleu” cloud project—a high-profile partnership between Microsoft, Orange, and Capgemini—was designed as a sovereign alternative. Microsoft would supply technologies (but hold no capital), supposedly insulating customers from extraterritorial reach. Yet even here, company executives admitted that disruption of US technology supply would cripple the system, and core dependencies on American software persist at every operational level.
The US legal principle of extraterritoriality, exemplified by the Cloud Act, means that even “Europeanized” platforms operated by local partners can be exposed to data access demands. Efforts like SecNumCloud certification attempt to break this link, requiring providers to demonstrate legal immunity from foreign interference. However, the challenge for European providers is scale; it is extremely expensive and technically complex to match the coverage, resilience, and feature set of US hyperscalers while ensuring immunity from legal overreach.
At the EU level, regulatory moves such as the Digital Markets Act, the Data Governance Act, and ongoing enhancements to GDPR aim to rebalance power away from foreign platforms, especially where market dominance is tied to privacy guarantees. European authorities are closely watching how dominant cloud providers’ privacy implementations affect competition and data sovereignty.
However, even when government policy is clear, actual implementation is more complex. Legacy contracts, technical inertia, and the daunting prospects of cloud migration (including downtime, compatibility challenges, and staff retraining) have slowed the adoption of local cloud alternatives. The Health Data Hub remains a prime example—despite multiple parliamentary resolutions and mounting public pressure, full migration away from Azure is still pending, reportedly due to the technical and contractual burdens involved.
From a budgetary standpoint, international hyperscalers routinely underbid their European rivals due to economies of scale, integrated service portfolios, and aggressive pricing for government and educational contracts. For procurement officials required to maximize value for public money, the business case for choosing Microsoft is clear—even if it collides with digital sovereignty objectives.
Furthermore, US platforms accelerate access to cutting-edge innovations. The French startup Alan, for example, claims that its use of AWS infrastructure enabled it to rapidly deliver new services for public health insurance—innovations that may have faced significant delays or technical obstacles within a smaller European-only provider ecosystem.
Yet the environment remains fiercely competitive. European alternatives must match not only on compliance but also on reliability, speed, elasticity, and support—attributes that have become table stakes for mission-critical public sector workloads. Until they can do so, risk-averse procurers may revert to the perceived safety of market-tested US providers.
The coming years will prove critical. Will France and its European allies accept ongoing dependencies in exchange for convenience and capability? Or will they invest—at significant short-term expense—in developing and enforcing a genuinely sovereign, resilient, and independent digital ecosystem? The answer will shape not only public procurement, but the future of European privacy, security, and self-determination in the networked age.
Source: PPC Land Microsoft can't protect French data from US government access
On June 10, 2025, under oath before the French Senate inquiry commission investigating public procurement’s impact on digital sovereignty, Carniaux was asked the question that’s haunted European policymakers for years: “Can you guarantee that French citizen data hosted in EU datacenters by Microsoft will not be accessed by US authorities without explicit French authorization?” His answer was unequivocal: “No, I cannot guarantee it.”This admission, while astonishing in its candor, shouldn’t be entirely surprising. Microsoft and other US-headquartered hyperscalers—companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud—have long faced legal realities that often contradict their marketing assurances about local data protection. Carniaux referred specifically to the US Cloud Act, a piece of legislation granting American authorities the power to compel US companies to provide data stored anywhere in the world, regardless of local privacy protections. Even as Microsoft emphasizes its technical and contractual safeguards, the testimony carved out the legal bottom line: in the face of a valid US legal request, compliance is ultimately obligatory.
The Cloud Act and Contrary Assurances: Legal Frameworks Overrule Technical Safeguards
Microsoft’s testimony illuminated the sharp edges of the Cloud Act, which American lawmakers framed as a modernization of law enforcement’s data access powers in a globalized cloud era. Under this law, US companies are legally bound to produce data held on foreign soil—even where this conflicts with regional privacy laws such as Europe’s GDPR. Carniaux’s acknowledgment drew a rare line between Microsoft’s transparent, customer-oriented approach to government requests, and the immutable legal duty to comply with lawful US demands.Pierre Lagarde, Microsoft’s technical director for the public sector, provided detail on efforts since 2022 to localize customer data. “Since January 2025, under contractual guarantee, the data of our European clients does not leave the EU, whether at rest, in transit, or being processed,” he asserted. However, as the Senate hearing revealed, these technical and contractual measures are fundamentally limited by extraterritorial US legal powers.
Transparency reports from Microsoft attempt to assuage these fears by showing that no European company has (publicly, at least) been affected by Cloud Act requests in recent years. However, as critics point out, transparency reports may not reflect the full extent of government demands, especially in national security contexts where classified processes are common. Therefore, while the numbers may reassure the public on the surface, the legal vulnerability remains baked into the structure.
A Timeline of French Cloud Sovereignty Dilemmas
2019: The Health Data Hub Fiasco
At the heart of the Senate’s inquiry was the Health Data Hub (HDH), a cloud-based platform established in 2019 to accelerate French medical research by pooling and analyzing national health data. Despite warnings from privacy advocates, legislators, and public sector unions, the HDH chose Microsoft Azure for its foundational hosting—igniting a debate over whether government data should reside within infrastructure controlled by foreign powers. The logic: even if data never physically leaves Europe, a US cloud provider may be legally compelled to hand it over to American authorities.2022: Enhanced Data Residency Measures
Microsoft’s response included bolstering its European data residency offers, aiming to assure government and enterprise clients that their most sensitive data would reside (and be processed) only within the European Union. New technical controls, strict internal procedures for handling government requests, and contractual clauses gave clients the impression of near-absolute sovereignty.2024: SREN Law and the Slow March to Sovereignty
In response to mounting pressure, France passed the SREN law, which mandates that sensitive government data must migrate to cloud providers certified under “SecNumCloud”—a rigorous French standard designed to exclude providers exposed to extraterritorial legislation like the Cloud Act. Yet as the Senate hearing confirmed, enforcement of this migration has lagged, with many ministries still procuring cloud services from US hyperscalers.June 2025: The Senate Testimony That Changed the Game
Carniaux’s explicit refusal to guarantee data immunity from US authorities crystallized years of suspicion into a moment of legal and political clarity. It also placed new scrutiny on decades of French procurement decisions, where Microsoft, in particular, has won contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros—even in the face of viable bids from domestic cloud providers such as OVHcloud and Scaleway.The Procurement Paradox: Digital Sovereignty vs. Practical Dependency
Perhaps the most damning aspect revealed by Senate investigators was the apparent contradiction between France’s declared digital sovereignty goals and its continued reliance on foreign, primarily American, service providers. Interviews and documentation showed that French cloud providers were routinely consulted only as an afterthought during major government IT procurements. Despite possessing increasingly robust technical capabilities, firms like OVHcloud and Scaleway were sidelined in favor of Microsoft’s seemingly unsurpassed scale, feature set, and reliability.Consider the education ministry’s contracts with Microsoft—worth up to 152 million euros—for productivity software used across public schools and universities. While French policymakers tout national independence, these contracts cement dependencies that place millions of workstations, emails, and documents within potential reach of US law enforcement and intelligence.
The “Bleu” cloud project—a high-profile partnership between Microsoft, Orange, and Capgemini—was designed as a sovereign alternative. Microsoft would supply technologies (but hold no capital), supposedly insulating customers from extraterritorial reach. Yet even here, company executives admitted that disruption of US technology supply would cripple the system, and core dependencies on American software persist at every operational level.
Technical and Legal Obstacles to Real Sovereignty
The dream of a truly sovereign European cloud remains largely aspirational. Despite promotional rhetoric, nearly every “sovereign” solution proposed by European public agencies exhibits dependencies on American technology stacks—ranging from virtualization environments to security software and orchestration tools. The Senate hearing underscored this, with Microsoft echoing what many in the industry already know but rarely say publicly: technical sovereignty is not only about where the data sits, but who controls the full stack.The US legal principle of extraterritoriality, exemplified by the Cloud Act, means that even “Europeanized” platforms operated by local partners can be exposed to data access demands. Efforts like SecNumCloud certification attempt to break this link, requiring providers to demonstrate legal immunity from foreign interference. However, the challenge for European providers is scale; it is extremely expensive and technically complex to match the coverage, resilience, and feature set of US hyperscalers while ensuring immunity from legal overreach.
Europe’s Regulatory and Market Response: A Shifting Landscape
French and European regulators have begun to react to the growing unease. The SREN law explicitly requires that sensitive or strategic data must be hosted by SecNumCloud-certified providers—effectively freezing out most US hyperscalers. The French National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI) audits providers and regularly updates certification criteria to respond to emerging threats. While enforcement has been patchy, the direction is clear: next-generation procurement must prioritize domestic alternatives or those that can demonstrate real independence from non-European jurisdictions.At the EU level, regulatory moves such as the Digital Markets Act, the Data Governance Act, and ongoing enhancements to GDPR aim to rebalance power away from foreign platforms, especially where market dominance is tied to privacy guarantees. European authorities are closely watching how dominant cloud providers’ privacy implementations affect competition and data sovereignty.
However, even when government policy is clear, actual implementation is more complex. Legacy contracts, technical inertia, and the daunting prospects of cloud migration (including downtime, compatibility challenges, and staff retraining) have slowed the adoption of local cloud alternatives. The Health Data Hub remains a prime example—despite multiple parliamentary resolutions and mounting public pressure, full migration away from Azure is still pending, reportedly due to the technical and contractual burdens involved.
Strengths of the Current System: Reliability, Cost, and Innovation
The continued prevalence of American cloud providers is not simply a product of inertia or misplaced trust. Their technical strengths are real and well-earned. Hyperscalers like Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud operate massive, globally distributed networks, offering redundancy, 99.999% uptime, and customer support unavailable to many smaller firms. Their scale enables them to deploy high-end security features, process millions of transactions per second, and deliver new AI-powered capabilities at pace.From a budgetary standpoint, international hyperscalers routinely underbid their European rivals due to economies of scale, integrated service portfolios, and aggressive pricing for government and educational contracts. For procurement officials required to maximize value for public money, the business case for choosing Microsoft is clear—even if it collides with digital sovereignty objectives.
Furthermore, US platforms accelerate access to cutting-edge innovations. The French startup Alan, for example, claims that its use of AWS infrastructure enabled it to rapidly deliver new services for public health insurance—innovations that may have faced significant delays or technical obstacles within a smaller European-only provider ecosystem.
Notable Weaknesses: Sovereignty, Transparency, and Systemic Vulnerabilities
Yet these strengths are precisely what create the most significant risks for European digital autonomy:- Legal Exposure: There is now open confirmation that US law can override European privacy guarantees for any US-based company, regardless of where its data physically resides.
- Procurement Arbitrage: Public sector procurement consistently rewards scale and legacy relationships over strategic autonomy, undermining efforts to build up robust European alternatives.
- Transparency Gaps: While transparency reports provide some accountability, they cannot capture all the ways governments (especially security agencies) may access data. Classified requests and opaque legal instruments, such as National Security Letters or secret court orders, can bypass standard reporting mechanisms.
- Technical Dependencies: Even when “European” or “sovereign” solutions are adopted, lower-level dependencies on US software, chips, or cloud architectures persist, creating backdoors for unanticipated vulnerabilities or leverage points.
- Market Concentration: By continually selecting US providers, European governments risk creating a cycle where domestic providers are locked out of major contracts, reducing their ability to compete at scale and innovate independently.
Potential Risks and Scenarios
The implications of Microsoft’s testimony reverberate far beyond impressing public officials or shifting procurement preferences—they highlight real risks with long-term social, political, and economic consequences:- Mass Surveillance: Even without evidence of routine abuse, the Cloud Act makes European citizens' data accessible to US agencies, raising the specter of surveillance beyond local democratic oversight.
- Strategic Leverage: In times of geopolitical conflict, US authorities could theoretically restrict or demand data access, leveraging legal powers for diplomatic advantage.
- Compliance Uncertainty: European organizations face a legal minefield: comply with US requests and risk GDPR violations, or defy them and face sanctions in the US, with neither option guaranteeing user privacy.
- National Security: Critical infrastructure, including health, education, and energy, may be exposed to foreign legal vulnerabilities during crises or disputes.
European Alternatives: Strengthening the Homegrown Ecosystem
Several homegrown providers, such as OVHcloud, Scaleway, and Outscale, have recognized an opportunity in the post-testimony procurement landscape. Demand for SecNumCloud-compliant infrastructure is surging, with government ministries and agencies now prioritizing sovereignty in requests for proposals. These providers, while still trailing hyperscalers in feature set, are investing heavily in scalability, automation, and redundancy. The French and wider European governments have responded with funding initiatives—most notably through the France 2030 investment plan—to stimulate the development and scaling of indigenous cloud offerings.Yet the environment remains fiercely competitive. European alternatives must match not only on compliance but also on reliability, speed, elasticity, and support—attributes that have become table stakes for mission-critical public sector workloads. Until they can do so, risk-averse procurers may revert to the perceived safety of market-tested US providers.
Towards Genuine Digital Sovereignty: What’s Needed?
Europe now faces a stark choice. The Senate testimony has crystallized the reality: so long as critical systems operate atop American technology, digital sovereignty is compromised. A few potential paths forward emerge:- Strengthen Enforcement: Accelerate the implementation and enforcement of laws like SREN, requiring strict compliance for all ministries, with clear migration deadlines and penalties for non-compliance.
- Empower Domestic Alternatives: Channel greater investment and public sector business toward domestic and European providers, enabling them to achieve scale and innovate at parity with hyperscalers.
- Audit the Stack: Conduct thorough, regular audits of technology stacks used in “sovereign” projects, systematically identifying and minimizing dependencies on non-European technologies.
- Legal Countermeasures: Pursue bilateral diplomatic solutions, mutual legal assistance treaties, or EU-level legislative proposals countering extraterritorial reach from foreign laws.
- Public Awareness: Increase transparency at every stage—from procurement, to data handling, to incident response—ensuring citizens understand how and where their data is hosted, and the legal regimes governing it.
Conclusion: The Future of Data Sovereignty in Europe
Microsoft’s candor before the French Senate marks a turning point in European digital policy. While cloud computing has delivered unparalleled reliability, innovation, and cost savings, it has also exposed governments and businesses to hidden legal and technical dependencies. Europe’s scramble to regain data autonomy is now firmly in the spotlight, forcing policymakers to confront the cost and complexity of true independence.The coming years will prove critical. Will France and its European allies accept ongoing dependencies in exchange for convenience and capability? Or will they invest—at significant short-term expense—in developing and enforcing a genuinely sovereign, resilient, and independent digital ecosystem? The answer will shape not only public procurement, but the future of European privacy, security, and self-determination in the networked age.
Source: PPC Land Microsoft can't protect French data from US government access