European cloud providers back EU push to cut reliance on US tech giants

A coalition of thirteen European cloud providers and industry groups published a joint statement endorsing the European Commission’s push to wean the continent off American technology infrastructure. The signatories include OVHcloud from France, Germany’s Nextcloud, and Switzerland’s Proton, all throwing their weight behind policy changes that could reshape how European governments buy cloud services.

The timing is not accidental. The European Commission is expected to roll out revised procurement rules that would give preference to EU-based cloud providers for sensitive government contracts, particularly in cloud and AI projects.

The market gap is enormous

US cloud giants, specifically Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, control approximately 70% of the European cloud market. European providers collectively hold under 15%.

No specific funding commitments or timelines accompanied the announcement. The focus at this stage is policy advocacy.

Years of sovereignty talk, minimal sovereignty results

This isn’t Europe’s first attempt at digital independence. The Gaia-X initiative, launched between 2019 and 2020, was supposed to create a federated European data infrastructure that could compete with American hyperscalers.

The European Parliament adopted a technological sovereignty report in January 2026, calling for accelerated action on digital infrastructure independence. That gives the Commission more political cover to push through procurement rules that would have seemed protectionist a few years ago.

Transatlantic tensions, regulatory friction between GDPR and US data access laws, and European unease about depending on foreign infrastructure for healthcare records and defense communications have created an environment where “buy European” sounds like risk management.

What this means for the tech and investment landscape

If the Commission follows through on procurement reform, the most immediate beneficiaries would be European cloud providers competing for government contracts. Public-sector spending on cloud services across the EU runs into the billions annually, and redirecting even a portion of that toward local providers would meaningfully change the revenue picture for companies like OVHcloud.

Investors tracking European tech should monitor two things closely: whether the Commission actually codifies procurement preferences into binding rules, and whether the funding follows the rhetoric. The January 2026 parliamentary report suggests genuine political will exists, but converting that into competitive European cloud infrastructure is a multi-year, multi-billion-euro project with no guaranteed outcome.

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