Thirteen European cloud providers and allied organizations have thrown their weight behind the European Commission’s push for technological sovereignty, signing an open letter that calls for the continent to build, buy, and protect its own digital infrastructure.
US cloud giants, specifically Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, control roughly 65-70% of the EU cloud market.
What the letter actually says
The signatories, which include OVHcloud, Nextcloud, several NGOs, and members of the European Parliament, are rallying around a clear mantra: “Build European, buy European, protect European.” The phrase is aimed squarely at how EU governments handle public tenders for cloud services.
When a European government agency needs cloud infrastructure, these groups want European providers to get priority, especially for sensitive workloads like defense, healthcare, and public administration data.
The letter frames technological sovereignty as Europe’s ability to independently design, select, implement, and regulate the digital systems that underpin its society and economy.
The US CLOUD Act gives American law enforcement the ability to compel US-based tech companies to hand over data stored overseas. For European policymakers already navigating GDPR compliance, the tension between these two legal frameworks has been a slow-burning headache for years.
Discussions that began in May 2026 around restricting US cloud services for sensitive government data appear to have accelerated this open letter into existence. Policy announcements from the Commission were expected around June 3-4, 2026, potentially adding concrete procurement rules and funding mechanisms.
Europe’s cloud sovereignty problem, by the numbers
The Gaia-X initiative, operational since roughly 2019-2020, was designed to create a federated European cloud ecosystem to let smaller European providers interoperate and compete with the hyperscalers. Gaia-X remains active, but it hasn’t dented the market share math.
OVHcloud, the French provider and one of the letter’s signatories, is probably Europe’s most visible homegrown cloud alternative. The gap isn’t just about servers and data centers — it’s about ecosystems, developer tooling, AI capabilities, and the sheer gravitational pull of platforms that millions of businesses already depend on.
The geopolitical backdrop
The proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, part of the broader policy framework the Commission has been assembling, signals that Brussels views cloud sovereignty and AI capability as two sides of the same coin.
The letter also touches on local chip production, a nod to Europe’s parallel effort to reduce semiconductor dependence. The EU Chips Act, which preceded this cloud sovereignty push, laid the groundwork for that conversation.
What this means for investors
If the Commission follows through with procurement policies that genuinely favor European providers for sensitive public sector workloads, the beneficiaries are obvious: companies like OVHcloud, Nextcloud, and other EU-based cloud firms.
There’s a secondary play in European semiconductors. If the sovereignty push genuinely extends to local chip production for cloud infrastructure, companies in the EU semiconductor supply chain could see tailwinds from both the Chips Act and cloud procurement mandates working in tandem.
There’s also the question of what “sensitive” means in practice. If the definition is narrow, covering only classified government data, the addressable market for European providers stays small. If it expands to include healthcare, education, and critical infrastructure broadly, the revenue implications grow substantially.
The upcoming Commission policy announcements will be the first real test of whether this initiative has teeth. Investors should watch for specific procurement thresholds, funding commitments, and timelines.