Europe has been talking about digital sovereignty for years, but almost always from a regulatory perspective. It has rules, discourse, and political concerns, but still faces a scale problem. While Brussels tries to reduce strategic dependencies, the actual cloud market remains dominated by a handful of American giants. In this context, the new Open Cloud Alliance launched in the Netherlands has become more than just a local initiative: it’s one of the first serious efforts to bring together multiple national providers to genuinely compete for public contracts and offer a more credible European alternative.
The alliance includes Centric, KPN, Info Support, Intermax, Nebul, Previder, and Uniserver, seven Dutch companies that have jointly issued a manifesto to promote a sovereign cloud for government and critical services. Their message goes beyond technology: they also address employment, taxes, European jurisdiction, and the ability to react to an increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment. They don’t promise to overthrow Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud overnight, but they aim to demonstrate that, united, medium-sized European companies can stop being fragmented players and become a genuine option for complex and sensitive projects.
The cloud has become a strategic issue
The Dutch movement doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. According to Synergy Research Group, the global infrastructure cloud services market reached $419 billion in 2025, driven largely by AI demand, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google together controlling about 63% of enterprise cloud infrastructure spending by the end of 2025. The size of this business explains why cloud discussions are no longer just technical: those who dominate this layer control an increasingly significant part of the digital economy.
In the Netherlands, dependence is especially visible. An analysis of 16,500 domains used by public agencies, hospitals, educational centers, and other essential entities concluded that 67% were linked to at least one American cloud service. While this doesn’t mean all traffic or data is controlled by a single provider, it reflects how much everyday and sensitive infrastructure relies on foreign technology and jurisdiction. Concerns grew even more with the potential sale of Solvinity, provider of the digital identity system DigiD, to the US firm Kyndryl—an operation that acted as a catalyst for political and business debates in the Netherlands.
The Open Cloud Alliance aims to address this issue with a straightforward logic: individually, each provider has useful capabilities, but they can’t realistically compete with the commercial, technical, and contractual scale of the US hyperscalers; together, however, they can present a more robust block. This is the real Dutch experiment—and also why other European countries are watching it closely.
What does the Open Cloud Alliance actually propose?
The manifesto presented in The Hague offers a very concrete plan. The seven members claim they already have autonomous cloud platforms, modern data centers, and enough capacity to host critical systems and sensitive data under Dutch and European jurisdiction. Supported by DINL and TNO, they promise that early migrations of applications and data to sovereign platforms could begin as soon as 2026. Their messaging emphasizes that the technology and capacity already exist, and that the main issues are less technical and more political and related to public procurement.
The architecture of their proposal rests on three ideas. First, the use of open standards to facilitate interoperability and mobility between providers. Second, a structured collaboration that allows bidding on larger projects without eliminating competition among them. And third, a form of sovereign continuity clause: if one member is acquired by a non-European company, others could step in to prevent critical data and services from leaving Dutch territory. The manifesto also mentions a future Open Reference Cloud Architecture (ORCA) to develop a common technical framework.
This combination of cooperation and interoperability is particularly relevant because it tackles one of the classic issues of public cloud: provider lock-in. Europe has been raising concerns about dependency for years, but many administrations and large companies remain trapped by migration complexities, the lack of truly common standards, and the difficulty of distributing workloads among multiple operators without escalating costs and complexity.
Europe regulates well but continues to scale poorly
The key question is whether this alliance can become something more than a political gesture. The short answer is that it can be significant, but not to be overestimated. We’re not looking at a European “anti-AWS” capable of changing the market in months. But it is a pragmatic approach that tries to fix a very European flaw: the continent has capable providers, talent, data centers, and public demand, but rarely manages to bundle all these into offerings large enough to compete with US giants. This gap even appears in EU documents. In January 2026, a EU Council document pointed to the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act as a way to address the lack of a competitive and large-scale European cloud offering for highly critical uses.
That’s why the Dutch case could be so relevant. Not because the seven partners will single-handedly topple Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, but because they introduce a replicable logic: increase distributed capacity, share standards, coordinate on public contracts, and turn government procurement into an industrial tool. Essentially, it’s a different kind of response than many other large European projects that got stuck in overly broad, hard-to-implement frameworks.
There’s also an economic and political component that’s not minor. The alliance advocates argue that public spending on local providers should not be seen only as a technological cost, but as an investment in employment, taxes, and knowledge within the country. While this argument may be somewhat self-interested—and it is—it ties into a growing debate in Europe: digital sovereignty isn’t just about laws, but also about companies capable of absorbing public spending and transforming it into industrial muscle.
A European experiment with more depth than it appears
The Open Cloud Alliance arrives at a time when several European countries are increasingly wary of their dependence on US cloud providers, especially in areas like digital identity, health, education, defense, and critical public services. The Netherlands isn’t the only example, but it’s one of the clearest in translating concern into a structured market response.
It remains to be seen whether the alliance can successfully execute its promise, maintain cooperation among competitors, and persuade governments used to working with hyperscalers’ scale and catalog. Even with those uncertainties, the Dutch move already offers an important lesson: Europe doesn’t need to wait for a single giant like Google to reduce dependency. Sometimes, better coordination of existing capabilities can make a difference.
If successful, other countries will follow suit. And if it fails, at least it will have demonstrated where bottlenecks still lie: not in rhetoric, but in transforming digital sovereignty into real capacity, contracts, and large-scale deployments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Netherlands’ Open Cloud Alliance?
It’s a coalition of seven Dutch cloud and IT providers—Centric, KPN, Info Support, Intermax, Nebul, Previder, and Uniserver—that aims to provide a sovereign alternative to major US providers, especially for public contracts and critical services.
Why is European dependency on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud a concern?
Because these three control about 63% of the global cloud infrastructure market, and many European administrations and critical sectors depend on platforms under non-European jurisdiction. In the Netherlands, an analysis of 16,500 domains found that 67% were linked to at least one US cloud service.
What makes this Dutch cloud alliance different?
Its approach combines open standards, provider interoperability, local capacity under Dutch and European jurisdiction, and a collaborative model to compete on larger contracts without eliminating competition in the market.
Can this model be replicated in other European countries?
In theory, yes. Its strength lies in coordinating multiple medium-sized actors under common technical and contractual rules, rather than creating a single new giant—something other EU member states could attempt to reduce external cloud dependency.
via: dutchnews