What's behind Europe's efforts to ditch U.S. software in favor of sovereign tech

· cloud policy · Source ↗

TLDR

  • European governments are cutting U.S. tech dependencies after the CLOUD Act exposed that data stored on European servers still falls under American jurisdiction.

Key Facts

  • France’s Health Data Hub is leaving Microsoft Azure for Scaleway, a French cloud provider, after a sovereign cloud tender.
  • The European Commission awarded a €180 million sovereign cloud contract to four providers; AWS’s European Sovereign Cloud was not among them.
  • France, Austria, Denmark, Italy, and Germany are exploring Linux and LibreOffice to replace Microsoft Windows and Office products.
  • Mistral AI and a proposed Cohere-Aleph Alpha merger show European AI firms pitching “not American” as a selling point abroad.

Why It Matters

  • The CLOUD Act’s extraterritorial reach means European data sovereignty requires more than local servers, pushing governments toward non-U.S. providers.
  • Private buyers and open-source substitutes still lag U.S. rivals in scale, leaving the shift uneven and dependent on public contracts to build momentum.

Anna Heim, TechCrunch · 2026-04-27 · Read the original

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