What sovereign clouds do offer
Sovereign clouds, by contrast, are simply not as populated with services. The European providers are legitimate businesses doing credible work. OVHcloud, STACKIT, Scaleway, and their peers offer the basics: compute, storage, even GPU access for AI workloads. But when you need thousands of specialized tools, prebuilt AI services, mature managed offerings, and the operational tools that surround them, they can’t compete with the hyperscalers. Nobody should pretend otherwise, and frankly, the European providers themselves don’t.
So when a government or a business mandates sovereign cloud for a workload, it’s frequently agreeing to replicate functionality that already exists elsewhere. They must either build it, integrate, or do without. That costs additional money, additional time, and additional risk. And in many cases, the replication effort fails to reach the quality of what it replaced.
The trade-off the EU is forcing
None of this means sovereignty is a bad idea. For certain data sets and workloads, sovereign attributes just make sense, and security or legal requirements may leave no room for negotiation. Classified military systems, core justice data, and border management platforms all should live under European control, and CADA’s exceptions framework at least acknowledges that reality.
