Hetzner

Hetzner has become a flagship name in European cloud sovereignty debates as an alternative to the US hyperscalers AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The company is consistently cited in European tech and government circles as evidence that EU-based cloud infrastructure can compete on price and performance without surrendering data to US CLOUD Act jurisdiction. Its presence in the European sovereign cloud discussion intensified in 2025 when the Commission opened DMA cloud probes into AWS and Azure — probes that strengthened the business case for switching to EU-native providers.

Hetzner Online GmbH is a German web hosting and cloud provider founded in 1997 and headquartered in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria. It operates data centres in Germany, Finland, and the United States, though its primary customer base and political relevance is its European infrastructure. Hetzner is privately owned and positions itself on the basis of price-performance leadership, offering bare-metal servers, cloud instances, and storage products at rates substantially below the Major US providers. It is a dominant player in the European developer and SME cloud market.

Hetzner lacks the enterprise sales force, managed-service portfolio, and certification breadth of AWS or Azure — gaps that remain significant barriers for large regulated enterprises in banking, healthcare, and defence that require extensive compliance auditing. Nevertheless, sovereign cloud spending forecasts project European cloud infrastructure revenue tripling by 2027, and Hetzner is positioned as one of the primary beneficiaries of that shift, alongside OVHcloud and Scaleway.