CNBC reported on Thursday 7 May 2026, and Germany's gHacks confirmed on Tuesday 12 May, that the Cloud and AI Development Act's leaked scope will bar US cloud providers from processing financial, judicial and health data on behalf of European Union public-sector clients1. CNBC's reporting names three targeted hyperscalers: Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. The leaked outline excludes private-sector procurement entirely.
The public-sector-only scope means roughly 70 per cent of EU cloud revenue, the enterprise market the three hyperscalers dominate, sits outside the restriction. Ministries, regulators and other public-sector buyers face the procurement floor; enterprises remain free to keep AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The shape of CAIDA as leaked is therefore a contracting rule for the slice of the market Brussels directly controls, not a competition rule that reshapes the European cloud market at large.
The leaked outline does not address the status of S3NS, the Thales-Google joint venture rated at the second tier on the Commission's Sovereignty European Assurance Level scale (SEAL-2), which sits inside the Commission's existing €180m sovereign-cloud framework. S3NS's continued eligibility under CAIDA is the file's most-watched detail at adoption. CISPE (the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe trade body) shipped a rival pass-fail badge in April; whether CAIDA inherits the multi-tier SEAL approach, adopts the CISPE binary, or introduces a third framework will signal whether Brussels is repeating its own April compromise or correcting for it. Neither the CAIDA text nor a leaked draft has been published; the scope is sourced from Commission officials speaking to CNBC, not from a circulated document.
