Brussels has spent years pushing to loosen Europe’s heavy dependence on American cloud providers. The latest move, the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, aims to classify services into risk tiers and favor local or tightly controlled options for sensitive public workloads. Yet a fresh study insists the price tag could run far higher than officials expect.

The research, conducted by the European Centre for International Political Economy and paid for by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, puts the 10-year bill at €115 billion in a middle-case scenario. That dwarfs the European Commission’s upper estimate of €18 billion. And the gap has triggered fresh debate over whether sovereignty is worth the hit.

Europe’s Costly Bid for Cloud Independence Faces Sharp Rebuke From US Tech Giants

The CCIA counts Amazon, Google and Meta among its members. So skepticism comes easy. But the numbers deserve a close look anyway. Direct costs to public budgets reach €33.3 billion. Another €80 billion could land on private firms in banking, healthcare, energy and transport — but only if regulators extend the strictest rules to 25 percent of those sectors’ cloud use. The study models that outcome rather than predicts it.

Software redevelopment drives most of the expense. Code rewriting and re-architecting account for 69 percent of the total in the main projection. Migration itself adds operating costs and delays. The Commission’s own analysis, critics say, missed these spillovers and underestimated one-time rework expenses.