Amazon expands ‘sovereign cloud’ in Europe

Amazon’s cloud computing division said Thursday that it would expand its “sovereign cloud” across the European Union, hoping to cash in as EU governments seek to safeguard their citizens’ data.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) would expand its physical “footprint” into Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal, it said in a statement, adding to a site in eastern Germany.

The expansion would “provide organisations with further options to deploy workloads in the cloud with the highest level of sovereignty and operational independence”, AWS said.

Spooked by a lack of European tech champions to compete with US giants, EU leaders have pushed “digital sovereignty” in recent years and called for reducing the continent’s reliance on American technology.

The worries have only grown as US President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a more confrontational tone with EU leaders, not least by seeking to annex the Danish territory of Greenland.

The American CLOUD Act further mandates that companies must pass on data if requested by authorities, adding to the clamour for back-end and cloud-computing services that run on EU infrastructure.

“By building a cloud that is European in its infrastructure, operations, and governance, we’re empowering organisations to innovate with confidence while maintaining complete control over their digital assets,” said Stephane Israel, AWS’s head of European Sovereign Cloud.

But Harald Wehnes, a professor of computer science at the University of Wuerzburg, told AFP he thought AWS’s announcement was an example of “sovereignty washing”.

“The American CLOUD Act means Europeans’ sensitive data can end up with the US administration as soon as it is with American cloud companies, even if it is stored on European servers,” he said.

“If I have a European cloud provider, like IONOS, Hetzner or Noris Network, that doesn’t apply.”

An AWS spokeswoman told AFP that customers could encrypt data held in the European Sovereign Cloud, and that AWS employees could neither access the data nor pass it over to US authorities if they did.

Amazon’s American rivals including Microsoft also offer customers the option of storing data in Europe, and German software giant SAP announced in September a 20 billion euro ($23 billion) investment into cloud computing as part of “data sovereignty” efforts.