The Europeans are not digging the American public cloud of late.
“Europe is facing regulatory pressure, competition between countries, geopolitical tensions, and national security concerns-all focused on making sure Europe can develop and manage AI systems on its own, without depending on foreign platforms or providers,” said Lovelock.
Leading to:
IT spending in Europe is projected to total $1.4 trillion in 2026, an increase of 11.1% from 2025, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc, a business and technology insights company. IT spending in Europe is on pace to reach $1.3 trillion by the end of 2025.
To use some framing from VC land, America broke the deal with cloud jurisdiction.
I’d wager that there’s still and will be a lot of European workloads running in American controlled clouds, but the idea that it can be long-term trusted is cracked. Not great.
🔗 Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in Europe to Grow 11% in 2026
And, related: regardless of where your data is geographically, if your cloud is owned by an American company, there’s a good chsbce it will operate under American laws and norms:
Data residency is a necessary but insufficient step. Hyperscalers can offer residency, but they cannot offer true sovereignty to their European customers because they cannot exempt themselves from extra-territorial application of certain laws. Unless the claims are substantiated by underlying evidence, they should be treated with a healthy level of doubt, more likely as marketing, than a genuine guarantee.
Real digital sovereignty is not a feature you can buy from a hyperscaler; it is a state that can only be achieved by partnering with an entity that is unambiguously and exclusively subject to your own jurisdiction and one that is offering the customer true capabilities of control and autonomous decision making for its data and data flows.