European governments and private firms are rapidly distancing themselves from American cloud infrastructure, a trend that took center stage at last month's KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam. Officials are moving to replace US-based software suites like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, citing the risk of American federal intervention in their digital operations.
Thierry Carrez, general manager of Linux Foundation Europe, argues that technical safeguards like encrypted memory are insufficient when faced with US federal mandates. He points to the February 2025 sanctions against the International Criminal Court as a turning point, noting that major tech providers complied with US government pressure to protect their domestic contracts.
"There is no tech answer if the Trump administration insists on an American company flipping the kill switch on your email, your office software, or even access to your US-hosted data," Carrez said during an interview in Amsterdam.
The shift to sovereign infrastructure
While hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have attempted to mitigate these concerns with "sovereign cloud" branding, European regulators remain skeptical. Former EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager recently warned that reliance on foreign, specifically US and Chinese, technology presents a strategic vulnerability.
"If it can happen once that a judge cannot use their email or does not have payment options, then it can happen again," Vestager told The Times. "It is a dependency, and it can be weaponized against us."
Governments in France, Germany, and Austria are now actively subsidizing domestic, open-source productivity platforms, often built on tools like Nextcloud. These nations are attempting to build a resilient "sovereign stack" that functions independently of US-based collaboration tools.
This transition faces significant hurdles, primarily a widening skills gap. Carrez noted that European universities have spent the last decade training students almost exclusively on US cloud ecosystems. As a result, public and private organizations now struggle to find the expertise required to build and maintain local infrastructure.
Carrez describes digital sovereignty as a spectrum of resilience rather than a binary state. He suggests that while a full migration to Linux desktops for public administration is not yet imminent, the push to localize the back-end infrastructure is already underway.
This movement is not limited to Europe. Carrez pointed to Vietnam’s state-backed push for national telecom workloads to run on open-source software, suggesting that nations globally are moving to decouple their critical digital services from a single-origin supply chain.
