Cloud infrastructure as a foundation for digital sovereignty
Europe’s dependence on a handful of US-based cloud providers is not a technical accident. It reflects deliberate market choices, policy gaps, and decades of institutional inertia. Three hyperscalers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—now control most of the European cloud market, while European providers’ combined share has fallen to around 13%.
Cloud infrastructure has become as foundational as energy or telecommunications. Yet, unlike those sectors, it lacks a regulatory framework that addresses market concentration, mandates interoperability, or ensures fair access. Governments, civil society organizations, and critical public services across Europe rely on computing capacity that is owned, operated, and ultimately controlled by actors outside European jurisdiction.
Recent geopolitical pressures have heightened awareness of this vulnerability. The policy agenda of 2026—including the forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CAIDA) and the revision of the Public Procurement Directives—offers a rare window to act.
This policy brief is part of a series produced within the NGI Commons project, informing advocacy on Digital Commons and digital sovereignty ahead of the next Multiannual Financial Framework (2028–2034). It sets out what a well-designed policy intervention targeting cloud infrastructure would look like: one that tackles the structural roots of Europe’s cloud dependency, opens the market to genuine alternatives, and ensures that public investment builds infrastructure that works for Europe.
The brief identifies two interconnected areas for intervention:
- Addressing cloud market lock-in—through transparent pricing, structural separation of infrastructure and service layers, open source–first requirements, and counter-incentives that rebalance the financial advantages currently offered by dominant hyperscalers.
- Transforming public procurement—by leveraging Europe’s significant spending power to create real demand for sovereign alternatives, embedding openness and interoperability as strategic criteria, and building the institutional capacity needed to assess and adopt those alternatives.
European and commons-based cloud providers do not need subsidies—they need customers and a level playing field. The structural conditions for that are within reach. The question is whether Europe’s policymakers will use the tools available to them.
