Trump’s Aggression Sours Europe on US Cloud Giants | EUROtoday

Dave Cottlehuber, the founding father of SkunkWerks, a small tech infrastructure agency in Austria, says he has been shifting the corporate’s few servers and databases away from US suppliers to European providers for the reason that begin of the 12 months. “First and foremost, it’s about values,” Cottlehuber says. “For me, privacy is a right not a privilege.” Cottlehuber says the choice to maneuver is simpler for a small enterprise reminiscent of his, however he argues it removes some taxes which can be paid to the Trump administration. “The best thing I can do is to remove that small contribution of mine, and also at the same time, make sure that my customers’ privacy is respected and preserved,” Cottlehuber says.

Steffen Schmidt, the CEO of Medicusdata, an organization that gives text-to-speech providers to medical doctors and hospitals in Europe, says that having information in Europe has at all times “been a must,” however his prospects have been asking for extra in latest weeks. “Since the beginning of 2025, in addition to data residency guarantees, customers have actively asked us to use cloud providers that are natively European companies,” Schmidt says, including that a few of his providers have been moved to Nöbauer’s Exoscale.

Harry Staight, a spokesperson for AWS, says it’s “not accurate” that prospects are shifting from AWS to EU alternate options. “Our customers have control over where they store their data and how it is encrypted, and we make the AWS Cloud sovereign-by-design,” Straight says. “AWS services support encryption with customer managed keys that are inaccessible to AWS, which means customers have complete control of who accesses their data.” Staight says the membership of the PCLOB “does not impact” the agreements round EU-US information sharing and that the CLOUD Act has “additional safeguards for cloud content.” Google and Microsoft declined to remark.

The potential shift away from US tech corporations is not only linked to cloud suppliers. Since January 15, guests to the European Alternatives web site elevated greater than 1,200 %. The web site lists every part from music streaming providers to DDoS safety instruments, says Marko Saric, a cofounder of European cloud analytics service Plausible. “We can certainly feel that something is going on,” Saric says, claiming that throughout the first 18 days of March the corporate has “beaten” the online recurring income development it noticed in January and February. “This is organic growth which cannot be explained by any seasonality or our activities,” he says.

While there are indicators of motion, the affect is prone to be small—at the very least for now. Around the world, governments and companies use a number of cloud providers—reminiscent of authentication measures, internet hosting, information storage, and more and more information facilities offering AI processing—from the massive three cloud and tech service suppliers. Cottlehuber says that, for giant companies, it could take many months, if not longer, to contemplate what must be moved, the dangers concerned, plus truly altering methods. “What happens if you have a hundred petabytes of storage, it’s going to take years to move over the internet,” he says.

For years, European firms have struggled to compete with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s cloud providers and technical infrastructure, which make billions yearly. It can also be troublesome to search out related providers on the dimensions of these offered by different European cloud corporations.

“If you are deep into the hyperscaler cloud ecosystem, you’ll struggle to find equivalent services elsewhere,” says Bert Hubert, an entrepreneur and former authorities regulator, who says he has heard of a number of new cloud migrations to US corporations being placed on maintain or reconsidered. Hubert has argued that it’s not “safe” for European governments to be moved to US clouds and that European alternate options can’t correctly compete. “We sell a lot of fine wood here in Europe. But not that much furniture,” he says. However, that too might change.

Schaake, the previous member of the European Parliament, says a mix of latest investments, a special strategy to purchasing public providers, and a Europe-first strategy or investing in a European know-how stack might assist to stimulate any wider strikes on the continent. “The dramatic shift of the Trump administration is very tangible,” Schaake says. “The idea that anything could happen and that Europe should fend for itself is clear. Now we need to see the same kind of pace and leadership that we see with defense to actually turn this into meaningful action.”