In February 2025, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court lost his email. Not to a hack, not to an outage. The United States had placed him under sanctions, and his inbox lived on Microsoft’s cloud. The companies involved dispute who exactly pulled which lever, but the outcome was plain enough: a prosecutor in The Hague ended up on a Swiss email service because a foreign government signed an order.
That story did more for European cloud sovereignty than a decade of conference panels. It took an abstract worry and made it specific. The question stopped being “is our data technically safe” and became “who can switch us off”.
The numbers nobody likes saying out loud
Three American companies run about 70 percent of Europe’s cloud. European providers held 29 percent of their own market in 2017. Today they hold 15, and the line has been flat for years. The market itself keeps growing at double-digit rates, which means everyone’s revenue goes up while the dependence goes up faster. The largest European clouds, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, hold roughly two percent each.
None of this happened because Europe lacks data centers, fiber or engineers. It happened because developers pick platforms, and for fifteen years the best developer experience in the world lived in Virginia.
”No, I cannot guarantee it”
Jurisdiction follows ownership, not geography. The CLOUD Act obliges American companies to hand over data on lawful demand wherever the servers stand. The European Court of Justice said in Schrems II that US surveillance law cannot be squared with European privacy rights. And in June 2025, under oath before the French Senate, the legal director of Microsoft France was asked whether he could guarantee that French data would never be handed to US authorities without French consent.
"Non, je ne peux pas le garantir." No, I cannot guarantee it.
Anton Carniaux, Microsoft France, French Senate hearing, June 2025
The hyperscalers heard the anxiety and turned sovereignty into a product tier. AWS is putting 7.8 billion euros into a “European Sovereign Cloud” with an EU parent company and EU-only staff. It is a serious investment, and it changes nothing about the only question that matters: who must obey when Washington calls. A region label is not sovereignty. Ownership is.
Where Europe’s first answer went wrong
Europe’s institutional response was Gaia-X: a consortium, launched in 2019, that was going to define a federated European cloud. It produced frameworks, working groups and certification schemes, and it admitted the very hyperscalers it was meant to counter. The CEO of Nextcloud called it “a paper monster”. That is the cautionary tale: you cannot legislate or consortium your way to a cloud people want. Somebody has to build one that a developer chooses at eleven at night because it is the nicest way to ship.
The tide turned anyway
2025 was the year the dependence stopped being theoretical, and the reaction shows:
- The Dutch parliament declared US tech dependence a threat to national autonomy and ordered exit strategies for government systems.
- Schleswig-Holstein moved 30,000 government workstations off Microsoft, and Denmark’s digital ministry started the same journey.
- OVHcloud crossed a billion euros in revenue, and European sovereign cloud spending grew 83 percent in a year, the fastest of any Western region.
- The EU Data Act outlaws egress charges from January 2027, and this month the Commission proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act, the first framework that ties “sovereign” to ownership and control rather than to a marketing label.
The demand side has arrived. What Europe still owes itself is the supply side.
The honest gap
Here is the uncomfortable part: Europe’s gap was never capacity or compliance. It is the product. A developer leaving a US hyperscaler today gives up a deploy experience that takes seconds and gains a pile of provisioning. And the platforms they leave were never neutral about it: a gigabyte of traffic out of AWS costs around ninety times what it costs at a German hosting company. Free to enter, expensive to leave. That is not a pricing model, it is a moat.
Convenience is how Europe was won, and convenience is how it gets won back. The answer to a catalog of 240 services is not a European catalog of 240 services. It is to leapfrog: make deploying to Europe the single nicest deploy a developer can have.
What we are building
This is the bet behind Frontback. Today it is one function, live seconds after you hit save. Tomorrow, the place where European software is at home, from the first endpoint to the agents that build alongside you. The ambition is a cloud so good the rest of the world wants one too.
Europe has done this before. It learned aviation under American license and then built Airbus. The next decade of the European cloud belongs to whoever makes sovereign the default and delightful at the same time. That work does not start in a committee. It starts with one function, saved, live on a URL that nobody else can switch off.