European Defence Officials Push Back on EU Cloud Sovereignty

About 1 per cent of Europe's public services would clear the highest sovereignty tier of the European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, and that thin slice is exactly where Europe's defence officials say Brussels has picked the wrong fight.

The Financial Times reports that defence officials and executives across the bloc are resisting the act, warning that a rapid retreat from US technology giants could leave armed forces with inferior systems, greater cyber vulnerabilities and more difficulty coordinating with NATO allies. The act, presented in June, would force member states to evaluate the sensitivity of each public sector service, with the highest level requiring solely domestic tech.

Officials' concern is that the top tier is where their equipment lives. In the FT's account, "defence officials and executives said they fear the rules could prevent militaries from using American hyperscalers for some of their most sensitive operations" before European alternatives are capable of replacing them. The recurring example is the F-35 fighter jet: US-made hardware whose digital infrastructure sits on American cloud services, embedded rather than bought as a swappable subscription. Opposition to the strict sovereignty requirements is strongest in eastern and Nordic countries, where NATO interoperability with US forces is treated as a hard constraint.

Others tracking the same debate agree the alternatives are not there yet. European Business Magazine argues that "European alternatives remain some distance behind the capabilities offered by American hyperscalers" and calls the Commission's approach "a sovereignty policy that is theoretically attractive but operationally disruptive."

The hyperscalers are not standing still either. AWS is backing a €7.8 billion investment in Germany through 2040, while Microsoft and Google market European-located variants that keep data and staff in region but keep core orchestration and code proprietary. Together AWS, Azure and Google Cloud already account for around 70 per cent of the EU's cloud market.

It lands mid-week alongside a busy run of infrastructure-and-sovereignty stories on our tracker, from Thailand pausing 49 data centres to Nvidia's $99B equity book, part of 456 AI infrastructure stories we have logged in the last 90 days.