Sovereignty: sold separately

I keep seeing news headlines about EU data-centre sovereignty and how we’re building more capacity to win the invisible “AI War” everyone seems to be fighting these days.

70% of the EU cloud market is already owned by the three horsemen: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. And most new capacity coming online is either owned outright by them or leased to them long-term. Big tech is expected to account for two thirds of European data-centre demand and most of the financing traces back to American balance sheets too.

A data-centre happily sitting on EU soil can still be owned and run by a US corp. Which means US law, specifically the CLOUD Act, can stick its nose into any data that a US company has “possession, custody, or control” of; a deliberately elastic term that a national-security-pilled administration has every incentive to stretch.

Brussels do sort of know this. The EU’s Cloud and AI act does define grades based on ownership, but the base one (the one for most public contracts) only requires a EU subsidiary and EU storage, not EU ownership.

Genuine EU-owned infrastructure is best, but only if it completely severs the umbilical cord to a US parent. And if a fully EU-owned data centre is running US cloud software, well, we’re back to the same choke point.

So, lots of Gigawatts coming, headlines about European resilience, but, below most of it, a cable leading back to the US. So much for sovereignty.

If your risk profile requires real EU hosting and jurisdiction, don’t just trust the sign on the building, make sure you dig all the way back to the roots.

Colin