Europe Spurs Digital Sovereignty With $213M Cloud Contract

Cloud Security , Geo-Specific , Security Operations Europe Spurs Digital Sovereignty With $213M Cloud Contract The European Union Is Cutting Ties With US Tech Companies David Meyer • April 17, 2026     Share Post Share Credit Eligible Get Permission The European Parliament in Brussels in a photo dated Feb. 12, 2022. (Image: Shutterstock) The European Commission made a significant move towards "digital sovereignty" by awarding a 180 million euro - approximately $213 million - cloud contract to a quartet of European providers. See Also: OnDemand | Cybersecurity for Cloud: Challenges and Strategies for Securing Your Enterprise Cloud The deal will allow the commission and the EU Parliament and council - and all their various offices and agencies - to procure sovereign cloud services over the next six years from Luxembourg's Post Telecom, Germany's StackIT, France's Scaleway and Belgium's Proximus. "These companies meet the commission's sovereignty objectives, including on transparency, environmental considerations, technological openness, but of course also security," spokesman Thomas Regnier said on Friday. The contract is explicitly pitched as a way to boost the European digital sovereignty by generating large-scale demand for continental cloud providers. But the commission took pains to stress that it isn't trying to exclude U.S. tech entirely. Proximus partners with S3NS, a joint venture between Google Cloud and the French aerospace-and-cybersecurity giant Thales. The Commission said the award shows "non-European technologies, when operated within a strict and appropriate framework, can meet the minimum level of sovereignty required." "To be eligible, the providers had to reach rigorous assurance levels ensuring that non-EU third parties have limited control over the technologies the providers use, or services they provide," it added. ISMG has asked Amazon Web Services, one of the commission's existing cloud suppliers, for comment, but received none at the time of publication. In March, hackers broke into one of the commission's AWS accounts and stole over 90 gigabytes of data from its Europa website platform. Data extortion group ShinyHunters subsequently made the data available on the darkweb, according to CERT-EU. Amazon denied any lapse on its part; CERT-EU said the credentials seemed to have been harvested through the Trivy supply-chain attack. Schwarz Group's StackIT , owner of the Lidl and Kaufland grocery chains, has been aggressively touting its sovereign cloud services in recent years, and is now referring to StackIT as a hyperscaler - something that Europe has conspicuously lacked. It inked a strategic partnership with the German Federal Office for Information Security in February, with the aim of jointly developing "highly secure and sovereign" cloud services for the public sector (see: Europe's Quest for a Domestic Alternative to US Hyperscalers). The commission's announcement is the latest episode in a flurry of moves across Europe to hedge against the possibility of losing access to U.S. tech. European officials now regularly discuss about what might happen if U.S. President Donald Trump - increasingly antagonistic towards Europe - were to force American firms into flipping a "kill switch" on their European users (see: Europe Moves to Neutralize US ‘Kill Switch' Anxiety). Cloud is a relatively new aspect to this shift. France, whose digital affairs directorate just ditched Microsoft Windows for Linux, is gearing up to shift the entire public sector away from non-European suppliers in the areas of workstations, antivirus, AI, databases, virtualization, network equipment and collaborative tools. Denmark is planning a similar abandonment of Microsoft tools, while the Austrian army and some German states have moved across to open-source productivity software (see: France Tees Up Big Public Sector Move Away From US Tech). Politico reported this week that the governments of France, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have all started migrating away from U.S.-based secure messaging services WhatsApp and Signal. The commission will follow suit later this year. "Our communication currently often takes place via platforms over which we have no control," Dutch digital minister Willemijn Aerdts told the publication. "In a world where technology is increasingly being used as a tool of power, that poses a risk."