MEPs seek EU cloud shift with US groups at 70% share

MEPs on Wednesday presented a draft report urging public authorities to buy more European cloud services, as Amazon, Microsoft and Google hold about 70% of Europe’s cloud market, Euronews reported Nov. 14.

The Euronews article said the proposal gained urgency after a Microsoft disruption this week; European providers account for about 15% of the market, down from about 29% in 2017, according to Synergy Research Group.

The Microsoft outage began on Thursday afternoon European time and affected users in 74 countries and territories, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Microsoft said there was no sign of a cyber attack, but had not named a root cause, Euronews reported. Services were still being gradually restored on Friday.

“The episode shows once again the downside of depending so heavily on a handful of large US tech companies,” Tommaso Valletti, Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School and the European Commission’s chief competition economist from 2016 to 2019, told Euronews Next.

Dutch Green MEP Reinier van Lanschot linked the proposal to control over essential systems. “Our critical systems run on someone else’s technology, and someone else can switch it off,” he said, according to Euronews.

The draft report addresses the European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act. The Commission also wants to triple the EU’s data centre capacity within five to seven years, a scale-up equal to three times today’s capacity, and bidding for up to seven EU-backed AI “gigafactories” closed on Thursday, Euronews reported.

A sovereign cloud is cloud infrastructure designed to keep operations under local legal and operational control. Amazon Web Services launched its European Sovereign Cloud in Brandenburg in January, run by a separate EU-based company, Euronews reported.

Europe has no single rival to Microsoft, Amazon or Google. France’s Mistral AI was valued at €21 billion after a €3 billion funding round led by Samsung in September. STACKIT, owned by the Lidl and Kaufland parent company Schwarz Group, is building an €11 billion AI data centre in Brandenburg, Germany.

Public support for European-controlled digital infrastructure is high, according to the latest Eurobarometer survey cited by Euronews. Support is highest in Sweden at 94%, Finland at 93% and Denmark at 92%.

Business demand is less clear. In a Bitkom survey, 85% of German companies said the country was too dependent on US cloud providers, yet 71% use one. IDC found that only 4% of European organisations plan to use local providers exclusively.

Parliament committees will discuss the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act draft report on Dec. 1. A committee vote is provisionally scheduled for mid-March 2027, followed by a plenary vote in April 2027. Microsoft has said it will publish a report on the cause of the outage once services are fully restored.