Europe's Sovereign Cloud: Resilience, Regulation and Pragmatic Plans

Europe’s sudden dependence on a handful of hyperscalers moved from abstract policy debate to urgent public‑policy problem this autumn, after two high‑impact outages — one at Amazon Web Services and one at Microsoft Azure — interrupted banking, transport, messaging and public services across the globe and re‑energised calls for a European “sovereign cloud.”

Background​

The modern economy runs on distributed, virtualised infrastructure: compute, storage, identity, content delivery and the control planes that bind them. For most organisations that means one or more of the three large U.S. hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Their combined share of global cloud infrastructure spending is well north of 60%, a concentration that market trackers such as Canalys and Synergy Research Group repeatedly report. Those market statistics are not an academic footnote. When a single provider’s DNS or front‑door routing system fails, dependent services and downstream ecosystems — from telcos to government websites and productivity tools — can degrade or vanish in minutes. The outages in October 2025 illustrated that reality: a major AWS disruption originating in US‑EAST‑1 on October 20 triggered cascading failures across games, financial apps and popular consumer platforms, while Microsoft’s October 29 incident disrupted airline check‑in systems, gaming services and government portals and was traced to an Azure Front Door configuration change. This technical fragility has policy consequences. Editorial arguments — like the Bangkok Post’s reprint of a Project Syndicate commentary insisting that “Europe must build its own cloud” — have gained fresh traction. They fuse operational risk with deeper geopolitical anxieties about jurisdiction, access and what proponents call digital sovereignty. The policy conversation now sits at the intersection of regulation (the Digital Markets Act and related competition tools), industrial policy (funding and procurement), and engineering (multi‑region and multi‑provider architecture). Debate about remedies is brisk and fractious. Forum analysis and industry commentary converges on two themes: short‑term resilience measures that agencies and admins can implement today, and a long‑term industrial strategy to reduce systemic dependency.

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Why “Build a European Cloud” is both attractive and misleading​

The political argument​

At a high level, the case for a European cloud is simple and persuasive: public services that store, process or infer on citizens’ data deserve legal and operational guarantees that are enforceable by European law and courts. That includes clearer jurisdictional control, transparent audit rights, and contractual assurances about administrative access. Political leaders who talk about tech sovereignty mean precisely this: the ability to set the rules and the enforcement mechanisms for critical digital infrastructure. Ursula von der Leyen first set this political goal in public as early as 2019, and the EU’s subsequent regulatory agenda (GDPR, the AI Act, DMA) has been shaped by the same impulse. The DMA, already used against major platforms in notable cases, is an example of a tool the Commission can use to curb dominant market positions.

The technical and economic counter‑argument​

But building a continent‑scale cloud to rival the hyperscalers is not just a policy choice; it’s a capital‑intensive industrial programme. Hyperscalers have spent tens to hundreds of billions on data‑centre capacity, networking and custom silicon. Canalys and other analysts report that the top three providers capture roughly two‑thirds of the market, and their investments in chips, AI accelerators and global distribution are the main reason. Replacing those capabilities overnight is impossible; even ambitious public procurement and subsidy programmes will take years, large budgets and sustained operational expertise. If sovereignty means simply moving workloads onto servers inside EU borders without addressing control planes, administrative access and supply‑chain software provenance, the gains will be mainly symbolic. At the same time, the hyperscalers are responding to these political pressures with product changes — “sovereign cloud” or “EU data boundary” offerings, for example — that try to combine scale with enhanced contractual controls. Those moves can mitigate some legal risks for customers but do not resolve the structural issue that these providers operate under U.S. corporate and legal regimes. Independent analyses emphasise the practical value of such offers while warning that they cannot substitute for true legal or industrial independence.

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What the outages taught us — technical lessons for Windows admins and IT teams​

The immediate engineering fallout from the October 2025 incidents yields a practical checklist that every enterprise and public‑sector IT team should action now.

• Inventory and classify: Map every mission‑critical workload and the specific cloud primitives it depends on (managed identity, managed DBs, CDN, global DNS, control‑plane services). Prioritise remediation for the top 10–20% of services that would break core state functions.
• Harden failover and multi‑region strategies:
• Use multi‑region active/active where latency and consistency permit.
• For control‑plane sensitive services, create portable fallback architectures that degrade gracefully (read‑only modes, cached tokens, local replicas).
• Test failovers with realistic chaos engineering and annual rehearsals; don’t assume the vendor status page will be your only source of truth.
• Reduce single‑provider blast radii:
• Treat managed primitives (identity providers, session stores, managed DNS) as high‑risk single points.
• Where possible, split responsibilities across providers or run a customer‑managed fallback (e.g., local AD DS cache, customer‑controlled key management).
• Contractual and procurement levers:
• Require incident transparency, independent post‑incident review and timely forensic reporting in SLAs.
• Mandate data export and exit guarantees, and test them in procurement pilots.
• Operational hygiene:
• Maintain out‑of‑band admin credentials and offline directory caches.
• Harden DNS, validate TTL behaviour, and have independent resolvers.
• Add control‑plane health checks into core monitoring and alerting.

These are practical steps that significantly reduce the material harm of a hyperscaler outage without needing to re‑engineer entire business models. They are also cheaper, faster and more likely to be implemented than building continent‑scale alternatives in the medium term.

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Policy instruments Europe already has — and why using them matters​

Europe is not starting from zero. A suite of regulatory and market tools can help rebalance incentives and lower the risk posed by concentrated cloud markets.

• Digital Markets Act (DMA): Already used to penalise “gatekeepers,” the DMA is a competition instrument that can be applied to cloud providers to force changes in interoperability and portability rules. Recent DMA enforcement actions against major platform practices show it can have teeth — but enforcement resources must scale.
• Procurement policy: Public buyers control enormous spend. By insisting on resilience minimums, vendor transparency clauses, and sovereign‑capable procurement frameworks, governments can shape provider behaviour and create demand for regional alternatives. Forum analyses emphasise a sovereign procurement marketplace as a pragmatic intermediate step.
• Federated and standards‑based programmes (GAIA‑X and Eurostack‑style ideas): These models focus on interoperability, trust labels and common standards, not on replicating hyperscale economics. They can expand choices by certifying offerings and guaranteeing portability across federated nodes. GAIA‑X, for example, emphasises governance and metadata standards rather than full on‑prem parity with hyperscalers.
• Targeted public investment: If Europe genuinely wants to build capacity for critical workloads — AI accelerators, confidential computing, defence analytics — then targeted industrial policy and long‑term funding commitments will be necessary. That does not mean duplicating every hyperscaler service, but selectively building the compute and service primitives that matter for national security and regulated industries.

These tools are complementary: regulation pressures behaviour, procurement creates demand, and targeted funding builds capability. Together they form an actionable policy playbook — but only if political will, budgetary commitment and cross‑member‑state coordination are sustained.

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Industrial proposals on the table — what's realistic?​

Headlines sometimes float grand projects — “Airbus for AI,” national sovereign clouds, new European hyperscalers. Several concrete concepts merit close attention.

• Airbus for AI: The idea borrows the Airbus model of pooling industrial and political resources across countries to build a sectoral champion. For AI and sovereign cloud this would mean shared procurement, R&D and a governance model that restrains market capture by any single national champion. The model is appealing in theory; execution requires multiyear funding, exportable product design and careful competition law navigation. It’s worth exploring for non‑commodity capabilities (defence, sovereign AI, critical national registries).
• Public‑private sovereign pilots (OpenAI for Germany style): Recent industrial collaborations demonstrate a pragmatic hybrid path: combine leading AI models with local operational control layers (sovereign clouds run by domestic operators) and strict procurement governance to meet immediate needs. These hybrids can deliver material sovereignty for public services while preserving access to advanced models — but they depend on enforceable audit and update controls.
• Federated commons and the Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium: A federated, standards‑driven set of interoperable services (identity, secure mail, archival) can be run as public utilities and offered to agencies as managed services. This lowers vendor lock‑in and increases auditability without attempting to replicate every hyperscaler feature. Forum research suggests focusing on the critical 10–20% of services where legal independence truly matters.

The pragmatic policy choice for Europe is likely a “mix and match” approach: subsidise and build where legal/operational independence matters; insist on procurement rules and independent audits for other services; and maintain open standards to foster portability and competition.

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The geopolitics: verified facts, rhetorical excess and genuine risk​

The Bangkok Post piece warns of a “kill switch” on the global digital economy because the main providers are U.S. companies subject to American law. That fear is not purely journalistic flourish — U.S. extraterritorial legal instruments and sanctions can and do affect non‑U.S. actors. In 2025, the U.S. imposed sanctions against International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan; subsequent reporting documented that Microsoft blocked access to Khan’s official email account, a demonstrable example of how platform policy and national measures can interact to produce disruptive outcomes. The AP and contemporaneous reporting documented the sanctions and the email access limitations. That incident highlights the reality that platform actions can have geopolitical ripple effects. At the same time, rhetorical leaps — for example, suggesting that a single foreign leader can casually flip a switch and shut down Europe — need careful qualification. Legal powers, sanctions and policy instruments have complex remedies, notice periods, and procedural guards; companies do not generally act without legal process. The risk is real and should inform procurement and strategic planning, but it must be handled as a strategic risk among many — not as the sole determinant of European digital policy. Expert forums and policy analysts caution against treating geopolitical risk as an unquantified emergency; instead, they recommend precise classification of critical workloads and targeted sovereign controls.

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A candid assessment of costs, trade‑offs and political economy​

• Financial cost: Building meaningful sovereign capacity at scale is expensive. Even targeted AI compute zones require multibillion‑euro investments, green power commitments and supply‑chain diversification. That spending competes with other public priorities.
• Environmental cost: New hyperscale sites demand land and energy; Europe will face local resistance if datacentre expansion is perceived as damaging to environmental or land‑use priorities. Policies must combine sovereignty with green energy planning and local engagement.
• Fragmentation risk: If each member state or sector builds incompatible stacks in the name of sovereignty, the result could be lock‑in by fragmentation — higher costs for public services and obstacles for firms operating across the single market. Federated standards and interoperability are essential mitigations.
• Industrial uplift: Sovereign‑oriented procurement and public investment can seed local industries — managed cloud providers, cooling and chip supply chains, and open‑source platform maintainers — that create jobs and exportable services. That upside is real, but it requires patient capital and credible market signals.

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Concrete policy and technical prescriptions — a pragmatic 12‑point plan​

• Treat cloud providers hosting critical public services as “systemic third parties” with mandatory incident reporting and forensics obligations.
• Use procurement power to prioritise sovereign‑capable offerings for classified and essential workloads, with contractual portability and exit guarantees.
• Fund targeted sovereign compute zones for defence, finance and critical AI workloads rather than trying to replicate every hyperscaler feature.
• Build a European sovereign procurement marketplace and shared public utilities for identity, secure email and document archiving.
• Mandate minimal multi‑provider resilience for essential public services (DNS, identity, payments).
• Require hyperscalers to publish post‑incident root‑cause analyses within agreed timeframes for outages affecting public services.
• Increase staffing and resourcing for DMA enforcement and open standard‑setting to reduce after‑the‑fact bilateral remedies.
• Invest in training and SRE capacity across public agencies to manage sovereign stacks and hybrid failover playbooks.
• Support open‑source stacks and local managed services with operational funding, not just code grants.
• Establish clear audit frameworks for sovereign AI projects (model cards, provenance, telemetry controls).
• Protect the environment by tying new datacentre funding to renewable power commitments and community benefit agreements.
• Coordinate procurement and standards across member states to avoid fragmentation and ensure interoperability.

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Strengths and weaknesses of the “break‑and‑build” approach​

The editorial prescription in the Bangkok Post — a combined “break” (competition enforcement) and “build” (industrial sovereignty) strategy — is practical in outline. Breaking concentration through antitrust and DMA enforcement can open room for new players. Building capacity in targeted sectors (AI accelerators, confidential clouds) addresses the worst vulnerabilities while minimising cost.
But the policy suffers two recurring weaknesses in public debates:

• Under‑scoping: Sovereignty is often invoked as an all‑or‑nothing goal. In reality, most services do not require full legal independence; they require contractual portability, auditable controls and multi‑provider resilience. A smarter programme targets the critical minority of services that would materially impede state functions if disrupted.
• Under‑resourcing enforcement: The DMA and associated rules only work if the Commission and national regulators have enough investigators and technical staff to enforce remedies at scale. Past EU regulatory successes required long investigations and heavy investor involvement; the same will be true here. On enforcement, the EU must stop announcing rules and start building capacity to apply them.

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Conclusion — workable sovereignty, not symbolic gestures​

Europe’s reliance on a concentrated cloud market is both a technical vulnerability and a policy challenge. The October 2025 outages demonstrated the operational fragility that arises when critical functions ride on a small set of vendors. At the same time, the practical path forward is not wholesale insulation from global providers, nor is it uncritical acceptance of vendor‑branded “sovereign” labels.
A credible European strategy combines immediate operational resilience (multi‑region failover, multi‑provider primitives, contractual SLAs and incident transparency) with a realistic industrial policy that targets: (a) the truly critical 10–20% of workloads requiring legal and operational independence; (b) investment in regional AI compute and confidential enclaves; and (c) federated, standards‑driven public utilities for identity and archival services. Regulation (DMA), procurement levers and targeted public funding must be synchronised and accompanied by a scaleable enforcement apparatus.
If Europe commits the political will, money and cross‑border coordination such a programme is feasible — and defensible. If it does not, the continent will continue to rely on guardrails and vendor promises that may be insufficient when the next large outage or geopolitical shock arrives. The sensible, sober middle path is to buy time with stronger procurement and transparency rules, harden operations today, and invest selectively where sovereignty truly matters. That is how Europe turns the rhetorical demand to “build our own cloud” into an operational strategy that improves resilience without bankrupting taxpayers or fracturing the single market.

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Source: bangkokpost.com Europe must build its own cloud