January 31, 2026
Cloud breakup: It’s not EU, it’s US
Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
EU plots a cloud breakup: fans cheer, cynics scoff, and price hawks yell “not at 10x”
TLDR: Europe is pushing to keep sensitive data on EU‑run clouds, even as Amazon pitches an EU‑only option that critics call “Euro‑washing.” Commenters are split between sovereignty supporters, price‑obsessed pragmatists, and skeptics who see political theater and technical hurdles—making this a high‑stakes, high‑drama cloud breakup worth watching
Europe’s big talk about ditching Uncle Sam’s clouds just crashed into the comments section—and the crowd is gloriously split. The article warns that US laws like the CLOUD Act could force American companies to hand over European data, even if it lives in Europe, and points at Airbus tendering €50 million for a truly EU‑run cloud as a sign the breakup is real. But the community? Oh, they brought popcorn.
On one side, sovereignty stans say get out now—they’re done trusting US giants, even with Amazon’s new “EU‑only” promise, which skeptics deride as Euro‑washing. Another camp calls the whole thing political theater. As one commenter grumbled, this sounds more like giving Brussels access to EU data than blocking Washington, and “just encrypt it” already. The snark was strong, too: a zinger about Europe birthing “five Fraunhofer institutes and a gift to SAP” had the thread cackling.
The pragmatists rolled in with calculators. “No one’s paying 10x to keep data in Europe,” warned the price hawks, while devs flagged a tech reality check: for SaaS (software you use via a web browser), keeping every byte local is hard; native apps can choose local servers, but web apps often can’t. Verdict from the stands: bold plan, messy execution, and a bill no one wants to foot—yet
Key Points
- •Gartner forecasts European IT spending to rise 11% in 2026 to $1.4 trillion, with increased investment in sovereign cloud and on‑prem/edge.
- •61% of European CIOs and tech leaders plan to increase use of local cloud providers; more than half cite geopolitics as limiting reliance on US hyperscalers.
- •AWS launched a European Sovereign Cloud, claimed to be EU‑located, separate from other AWS Regions, and operated by EU residents with added controls.
- •CISPE alleges the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework favors incumbent American hypercloud providers.
- •Airbus issued a €50 million, decade‑long tender to migrate mission‑critical applications to a sovereign European cloud to keep data under EU control.