Europe’s cloud sovereignty rules could do more harm than good

Europe’s drive for cloud sovereignty is leading to member states favoring providers from their own nation instead of building a Europe-wide cloud services market, according to a report critical of the EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA). A study by the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) looked at public cloud contracts in nine EU member states and found that every one that invoked the new vocabulary around “sovereignty” went to a domestic provider, rather than one based in another EU country. It says that European cloud procurement was already highly concentrated nationally before sovereignty became a key policy objective, based on analysis of 8,725 cloud-related procurement contracts between 2018 and 2025. Nearly all went to providers in the same country with negligible intra-EU cross-border competition. …