European sovereign cloud spending is forecast to triple from roughly $7bn in 2025 to $23bn by 20271. All 27 EU member states signed a digital sovereignty declaration in November 2025. European governments describe sovereignty as a "matter of national survival"2.
Budgets are growing, but the harder question is what runs on the infrastructure. AWS, Microsoft, and Google are all members of GAIA-X, Europe's flagship sovereign cloud initiative. The framework that was designed to reduce dependence on American providers now has the Americans inside the tent. GAIA-X's first multi-provider catalogue lists 600 services from 15 providers across four sovereignty tiers3. Only the highest tier (Label Level 3) excludes companies subject to the US CLOUD Act. Uptake data for Level 3 is not publicly available.
Domestic providers (OVHcloud, Hetzner, Scaleway) account for roughly a sixth of European cloud revenue, with US hyperscalers commanding the rest4. On price, the European alternatives win easily. But the vast majority of AI workloads on European cloud, sovereign or otherwise, use US-built models: OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini. You can run a US model on a German server and call it sovereign. Genuine independence requires sovereignty at both the compute layer and the model layer. Europe has plausible compute alternatives. It has almost no enterprise-scale model alternatives.
