Faced with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Europe is rediscovering the urgency of its digital sovereignty. For the first time, concrete signals indicate that dependence on American cloud giants is called into question. The rupture is still in its infancy, but the lines move.
At first glance, nothing has changed. European companies and administrations continue to host their data at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. The services work, the costs are under control, the integrations are running. However, since the beginning of the year, a growing malaise crosses computer departments, cybersecurity agencies and political bodies of the old continent.
Donald Trump, data protection uncertainties, and explicit geopolitical threats formulated with regard to Europe have acted as a revealer. What was part of the ideological posture – digital sovereignty yesterday – gradually becomes a strategic imperative.
The Cloud, Achilles heel of European autonomy
There is a clear desire to de-register the relationship with American hyperscalers “in the Netherlands, the House of Representatives has adopted eight motions asking the government to reduce dependence on American technologies. At the same time, more than 100 organizations have signed an open letter in favor of European technological autonomy.
In recent months, Several European cloud suppliers emanating from both SMEs and public institutions. The motivations are explicit: to anticipate any access restrictions, to thwart the extraterritorial effects of the Cloud Act, and regain mastery on data deemed critical.
From political conscience to technical arbitration
The leaders interviewed throughout Europe agree: the issues are not only regulatory or geopolitical. Digital sovereignty also involves heavy technical arbitrations. Uprooting thousands of servers, moving databases, reconfiguring cloud-native services: all of this takes months, even years, and requires rare skills.
The Vendor Lock-in is a reality. If you have built your infrastructure around AWS or Azure, getting out of the system amounts to rewriting half of your tools. In this context, Small structures are paradoxically more agile than large groups.
The decade of digital reconquest?
The central question is no longer whether Europe wants to reduce its technological dependence, but If she really has the means. The efforts made around Gaia-X, investments in OVHCloud, or Scaleway and the speeches of European commissioners on the “confidence cloud” are still struggling to compete with the colossal means of American hyperscalters.
But the dynamics could be reversed, provided you take action. Reserve a share of public procurement for European operators, strengthen location obligations, massively finance infrastructure and R&D: levers are known. It remains to activate them with the same determination as that which guided the budgetary alarm clock in matters of defense.
