The European Cloud Situation at the end of 2025 - Bert Hubert's writings

The European Cloud Situation at the end of 2025 As the year draws to an end now is a good time to review where we are with Europe’s cloud situation, and what has been achieved. One thing is certain, a lot has happened, and also quite a lot has become clearer. tl;dr: Great strides have been made in 2025, especially in convincing people that something must be done, and outlining what that might be. Industry buyers are not going to lead us since they mostly care about next quarter’s results. Governments will have to show us the way, but they are ill-equipped to do so. Meanwhile, Europe’s cloud/hosting providers are also not leading the charge. Initiatives like the EuroStack have outlined this odd situation with great clarity , and are providing pressure on decision makers to do things. Governments meanwhile are good at formulating policy, but bad at following it themselves . However, the financial industry is just as hooked on US clouds as governments are, and there is legislation on the books that tells them they should fix this. Regulators can likely force banks to do the right thing, and thus forge a path for governments to follow later on. Who should be driving all this is unclear however, but I’ve added some thoughts. In addition, there are “no regret” steps that could be taken right now. As usual, I want to thank the many proofreaders & experts who commented on draft versions of this post. Please don’t think I’m doing this all on my own! . If you’d like to be notified of new posts like these, please subscribe to my tracking-free newsletter . At the beginning of this year people were still telling themselves US clouds were safe to use for European governments & vital services. I wrote about this in February in a post called It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds . Back then this was quite a controversial take, but with the developments over at the International Criminal Court , and Microsoft’s admission that they can’t protect European data against US snooping , it has now become common wisdom: Governments and vital services need to look elsewhere . The US clouds did not take this news lying down and came up with “sovereign” versions of themselves, but by operation of US laws, these are not sanction proof, and can never be. It is very disappointing to see otherwise serious people believe these fairy tales . Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Meanwhile, a lot was said about what “Europe” could do, where we should always be careful what we mean when we say Europe. Do we mean the EU, or member states, or more broadly EU companies ? Of note is the EuroStack initiative , which made tremendous strides in pointing out our situation, and exhorting everyone to finally do something. There was the letter “ European Industry Calls for Strong Commitment to Sovereign Digital Infrastructure ”,...

Preview: ~500 words