Amazon expands ‘sovereign cloud’ in Europe

AFP | Frankfurt

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Amazon’s cloud computing division said yesterday that it would expand its “sovereign cloud” across the European Union, hoping to cash in as EU governments seek to safeguard their citizens’ data.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) would expand its physical “footprint” into Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal, it said in a statement, adding to a site in eastern Germany.

The expansion would “provide organisations with further options to deploy workloads in the cloud with the highest level of sovereignty and operational independence”, AWS said.

Spooked by a lack of European tech champions to compete with US giants, EU leaders have pushed “digital sovereignty” in recent years and called for reducing the continent’s reliance on American technology.

The worries have only grown as US President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a more confrontation tone with EU leaders, not least by seeking to annex the Danish territory of Greenland.

The American CLOUD Act further mandates that companies must pass on data if requested by authorities, adding to the clamour for back-end and cloud-computing services that run on EU infrastructure.