More than thirty European cloud and technology chief executives have signed an open letter to the European Commission demanding that upcoming legislation on cloud computing and artificial intelligence prioritize homegrown providers rather than further entrenching the dominance of American hyperscalers. The letter, addressed to European leaders ahead of a proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, is the sharpest collective warning yet from an industry that feels increasingly sidelined in its own market.
The message is blunt. Europe’s digital infrastructure — the servers, platforms, and AI services that will underpin everything from healthcare to defense — cannot remain under the effective control of a handful of U.S. corporations. Not if the continent wants genuine strategic autonomy.
As reported by TechRadar, the signatories include leaders from companies such as OVHcloud, Scaleway, Ionos, and other mid-tier European providers that compete — often at a steep disadvantage — against Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Together, these American firms control roughly 70% of Europe’s cloud market, a figure that has barely budged despite years of political rhetoric about digital sovereignty.
The letter’s timing is no accident. The European Commission is in the early stages of drafting the Cloud and AI Development Act, a legislative package that could reshape how public procurement, data residency, and AI infrastructure are governed across the 27-member bloc. The CEOs want to ensure the law doesn’t become another exercise in well-meaning regulation that ultimately benefits the incumbents it purports to constrain.
“We need a regulatory framework that actively supports European cloud providers, not one that creates compliance burdens only large non-European players can absorb,” the letter argues, according to TechRadar. The concern is well-founded. Previous EU regulations, including aspects of GDPR enforcement, have sometimes had the unintended effect of consolidating market power among companies with the legal and engineering resources to comply at scale — which tends to mean the very American giants Europe says it wants to counterbalance.
The frustration runs deep. European cloud companies have watched for years as their governments signed massive contracts with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, often citing technical superiority or the absence of viable European alternatives. That rationale has become self-reinforcing: the more public-sector workloads flow to U.S. providers, the harder it becomes for European firms to build the scale, expertise, and reference clients needed to compete. It’s a cycle the letter’s signatories want broken by law, not just aspiration.
Several of the companies behind the letter have invested heavily in sovereign cloud offerings — infrastructure that keeps data within European borders and under European legal jurisdiction. OVHcloud, France’s largest cloud provider, has positioned itself explicitly as the sovereign alternative. Germany’s Ionos and France’s Scaleway have made similar pitches. But sovereignty branding alone hasn’t been enough to shift procurement patterns, particularly when government IT departments are measured on uptime and capability rather than geopolitical alignment.
And this is where the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act becomes critical. The CEOs are calling for concrete measures: preferential treatment for European providers in public procurement, mandatory data localization requirements for sensitive government workloads, investment in European AI infrastructure, and interoperability standards that prevent vendor lock-in. They also want the Commission to establish clear criteria for what constitutes a “European” cloud provider — a definition that would exclude the European subsidiaries of American companies, which have increasingly marketed themselves as locally compliant options.
That last point is particularly contentious. Microsoft, for instance, has partnered with European operators to offer what it calls sovereign cloud solutions, where data stays on European soil and is managed by local entities. Amazon has made similar moves. The American hyperscalers argue these arrangements satisfy sovereignty requirements while delivering superior technology. European competitors counter that legal jurisdiction — specifically, the reach of U.S. laws like the CLOUD Act, which can compel American companies to hand over data stored abroad — makes such arrangements fundamentally inadequate.
The debate isn’t purely commercial. It touches on defense, intelligence, and the basic question of whether Europe can conduct sensitive operations on infrastructure ultimately answerable to foreign governments. France’s ANSSI, the national cybersecurity agency, has developed a “SecNumCloud” certification that imposes strict ownership and control requirements, effectively excluding non-European companies from the most sensitive tiers. Germany has pursued a similar approach through its Gaia-X initiative, though that project has been criticized for moving slowly and for including American tech firms in its governance structure.
Recent developments have added urgency to the discussion. The rapid proliferation of AI workloads — large language models, generative AI applications, and the massive GPU clusters needed to train them — has created a new front in the sovereignty battle. Training a frontier AI model requires enormous compute capacity, and right now, that capacity is overwhelmingly concentrated in U.S.-controlled data centers. If Europe wants to develop its own AI capabilities, the CEOs argue, it needs European infrastructure to run them on.
This isn’t a fringe position. The European Commission itself has acknowledged the dependency risk. Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner for the internal market, repeatedly warned about Europe’s reliance on foreign cloud infrastructure before leaving his post. His successor, Henna Virkkunen, who oversees tech sovereignty and security, has signaled continuity on the issue. But signals aren’t legislation, and the open letter is clearly designed to push the Commission from rhetoric to binding rules.
The financial stakes are substantial. Europe’s cloud market is projected to exceed €100 billion annually within the next few years. Even a modest shift in procurement patterns toward European providers could mean billions in revenue — enough to fund the R&D and infrastructure investments needed to close the capability gap with the hyperscalers. Without that shift, the signatories warn, Europe risks permanent dependency.
Not everyone in Brussels is sympathetic. Some officials worry that preferential treatment for European cloud providers could raise costs, reduce quality, and violate trade commitments. There’s also a pragmatic argument: European companies and governments need the best available technology to remain competitive globally, and if that technology comes from Seattle or Mountain View, so be it. Forcing a switch to less capable providers in the name of sovereignty could backfire.
But the letter’s authors reject this framing. They argue that European providers are already capable of handling the vast majority of enterprise and government workloads, and that the perception of a capability gap is partly a function of the market distortions they’re asking the Commission to correct. Give European companies fair access to public contracts, remove the structural advantages that hyperscalers enjoy through bundling and lock-in, and the competitive picture changes.
So where does this go? The Cloud and AI Development Act is still in its formative stages, and the Commission has not yet published a formal proposal. Industry consultations are ongoing, and the open letter is one of many inputs the Commission will receive. But the coordinated nature of the appeal — more than 30 CEOs from across the continent — gives it weight that individual lobbying efforts lack. It’s a signal that Europe’s domestic cloud industry is organizing politically in a way it hasn’t before.
The broader context matters too. Transatlantic relations on technology have grown more complicated. The U.S. government’s approach to export controls, data-sharing agreements, and tech regulation has made European policymakers more receptive to arguments about strategic autonomy. The collapse of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework, followed by protracted negotiations over its successor, underscored how vulnerable cross-border data flows are to political disruption. And the current geopolitical climate — with tensions over trade, defense spending, and AI governance — has created an environment where “buy European” arguments carry more political resonance than they did five years ago.
None of this guarantees the CEOs will get what they want. The hyperscalers have their own formidable lobbying operations in Brussels, and they employ thousands of Europeans. Any legislation that explicitly disadvantages American companies will face pushback from trade partners and from European businesses that depend on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for daily operations. The Commission will have to balance sovereignty ambitions against economic pragmatism.
Still, the letter marks a turning point. For years, European cloud sovereignty was mostly a talking point — something politicians invoked at conferences and promptly forgot when procurement decisions were made. The open letter, with its specific demands and its roster of named executives willing to stake their reputations on the argument, transforms it into a concrete policy fight. The question now is whether Brussels has the political will to follow through, or whether Europe’s cloud future will continue to be written in someone else’s data center.
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