Europe has a technology problem that can no longer be measured simply by comparing service catalogs. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google together account for around 70% of the European cloud infrastructure market, while European providers remain close to 15%. The gap is still huge, but public contracts, new private investment and decisions like Airbus’s move to bring in Scaleway show that digital sovereignty is starting to factor into purchasing decisions alongside price, specs and security.
European tech sovereignty in 20 seconds
- AWS, Microsoft and Google together hold around 70% of the European cloud market.
- European providers hold roughly 15%, despite the market’s strong overall growth.
- Germany has awarded a consortium including STACKIT a public AI platform contract worth around €250 million.
- Airbus has selected Scaleway for certain workloads that require greater control and sovereignty.
The usual objection is still hard to ignore: European alternatives don’t always offer the same catalog, international reach or maturity as the big US platforms. That’s true in many cases. The question for companies and public administrations is how many of those gaps actually affect the applications they need to run.
AWS, Azure and Google Cloud have spent years building enormous catalogs of infrastructure, databases, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, security, networking and managed services. Replicating that offering service by service would require investment that few European providers can afford.
But not every organization needs to replicate it, either.
For a considerable share of enterprise workloads, the core requirements remain relatively conventional: virtual machines, storage, databases, Kubernetes, backups, connectivity, observability, security and platform services. In those scenarios, the conversation can shift from who owns the most products to who actually meets each application’s specific requirements.
70% of European cloud still sits with three US companies
The numbers explain why the issue has moved from IT departments to Brussels.
Synergy Research Group calculated that the European cloud infrastructure services market reached €61 billion in 2024. European providers had more than tripled their revenue since 2017, but the market as a whole grew even faster.
The result is paradoxical. European companies are selling far more cloud than a few years ago, yet they control a smaller share of the market.
Their share fell from 29% in 2017 to roughly 15% in 2022 and has held around that level ever since. Amazon, Microsoft and Google together account for close to 70%. Among European providers, SAP and Deutsche Telekom rank as the largest, each with around 2%, followed by companies such as OVHcloud, Telecom Italia and Orange.
| European cloud market | Status |
|---|---|
| AWS, Microsoft and Google | ~70% |
| European providers | ~15% |
| European share in 2017 | 29% |
| European share since 2022 | ~15% |
| European market in 2024 | €61 billion |
The European Commission took another step in 2026. On June 25, it informed Amazon and Microsoft of its preliminary position to consider AWS and Azure as services subject to the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
This is not yet a final decision. The companies are entitled to respond before Brussels adopts a final ruling.
The Commission considers that both platforms hold entrenched positions and benefit, among other factors, from high switching costs, broad ecosystems and large customer bases. It also notes that AI tools and the partnerships built around them have become relevant factors when procuring cloud services.
This helps explain why tech sovereignty isn’t simply a matter of finding a European virtual machine equivalent to an AWS instance.
A company can move servers and storage and still depend on its previous provider for identity, proprietary databases, artificial intelligence, development tools, analytics or software as a service (SaaS). The more proprietary layers an organization uses, the harder they can be to replace.
Germany and Airbus start putting sovereignty into concrete contracts
Some recent moves show how a different strategy can play out.
In May, a consortium led by SVA System Vertrieb Alexander, alongside Codesphere and STACKIT, the cloud platform of Schwarz Digits, won the contract to build the new AI platform for Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and State Modernization.
The project is valued at approximately €250 million. STACKIT will provide the cloud infrastructure and holds certification from Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
The future platform is aimed at federal and regional administrations and covers applications such as document processing and support for certain administrative procedures.
This doesn’t mean Germany is about to replace all its US technology services overnight. It does show that sovereignty criteria can translate into contracts large enough to generate local demand.
Airbus offers another example, this time from the private sector.
In July 2026, the aerospace company selected France’s Scaleway as a sovereign European cloud provider after a competitive process, one of the moves that has also brought Scaleway’s growing profile as a European alternative to US cloud services into sharper focus. The contract covers certain enterprise applications that require higher levels of governance, resilience and legal protection.
There’s an important nuance here: Airbus did not announce a full migration from AWS to Scaleway.
The agreement is about complementing its existing cloud portfolio and moving or modernizing selected workloads within a sovereign environment. That distinction helps clarify where the market may be heading: fewer wholesale replacements and more architectures where organizations decide which workloads can stay with global hyperscalers and which need greater European control.
Private money is starting to move too
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension, because Europe needs more than software. It needs data centers, electricity, accelerators, networks and capital to finance that infrastructure.
Several funding rounds during 2026 have been anything but small.
British company Nscale announced a $2 billion Series C in March, valuing the company at $14.6 billion. It builds AI infrastructure that combines data centers, GPUs, networking, storage and software.
Wayve, also based in the UK, closed a $1.2 billion Series D, plus additional capital tied to Uber milestones as part of a package worth up to $1.5 billion. Its business is focused on AI for autonomous driving, so it isn’t a cloud provider comparable to Nscale, but it is part of the broader growth in European AI investment.
AMI Labs, the company founded around the work of Yann LeCun and Alexandre LeBrun on models designed to understand the physical world, raised $1.03 billion in March.
Those three announced deals alone represent more than $4 billion in capital, though they shouldn’t be added up as if they were equivalent investments in European cloud infrastructure. Nscale builds compute capacity; Wayve develops autonomous-vehicle technology; and AMI Labs researches AI models. They share in the growth of European tech funding, but their businesses are different.
The gap with the United States remains enormous. Data gathered this year shows that US companies are still attracting far more capital than their European counterparts. On top of that, part of the funding raised by European companies comes precisely from US investors and tech firms.
So sovereignty doesn’t necessarily mean all capital, hardware or software carries a European passport either.
That’s one of the practical limits of this debate. Europe can build its own cloud and data center providers and still depend on NVIDIA or AMD GPUs, Arm architectures, foreign networking equipment, US software and global semiconductor manufacturing chains.
What matters for some organizations may be identifying which dependencies are replaceable and which represent a risk worth addressing with an alternative.
A recent Capgemini study of 1,300 executives at large organizations reflects exactly that shift. Companies are paying closer attention to the possibility of replacing tech vendors in the face of geopolitical risk, cyberattacks and trade restrictions. That doesn’t mean automatically dropping the primary provider, but rather knowing what would happen if a critical service became unavailable or changed its terms.
That’s likely where the most practical part of European digital sovereignty lies.
A European provider doesn’t need hundreds of services to be competitive in every situation. But being European isn’t enough either. It has to deliver availability, performance, security, regulatory compliance, support, competitive pricing and fast enough technological evolution.
Origin can become another purchasing criterion, especially for public administrations, defense, industry, critical infrastructure and sensitive data. European tech competitiveness will have a better chance of growing if it wins real contracts, but those contracts will still depend on its products solving real problems.
Europe doesn’t necessarily need to choose between US and European technology. The shift now emerging is about keeping that choice from disappearing altogether.
