After less than three months in power, US President Donald Trump has already threatened to annex Greenland, hinted that Europe can no longer count on the military support of the United States, pressured European companies to scrap their diversity policies, and imposed a 20 percent import tariff on the EU (only to then press the pause button).
Leaders of European companies and governments are wondering how else Trump can hurt us, and how they can arm themselves against it. And then one realization painfully comes to the surface: Europe has made itself enormously dependent on American technology in recent decades. The chips in our data centers, the software on our computers and smartphones, the social media we consult daily, and the cloud services where we store our data: all are for the most part in the hands of American tech companies.
As long as relations with Washington were good, no one really lost sleep over it, with the exception of some privacy activists and a few politicians. But now the threat is becoming much more tangible. What if the US decides they must ‘punish’ Europe by denying it access to advanced AI chips or the latest software updates? What if Amazon, Google, or Meta is ordered to pass on data of European users to the American government?
Washington has had the means for the latter scenario in place for some time. In 2018, the US passed a law, the CLOUD (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act, which requires American tech companies to hand over their users’ data to US authorities upon request. Even if it is data of Europeans stored on a server in Europe. The law was intended to tackle serious criminals, but could just as easily be misused by an authoritarian regime to, for example, gather information about critical foreigners.
Decoupling
It is not surprising that many organizations are looking into whether they can ‘decouple’ their data and software from American providers. ‘We see this trend especially in sensitive sectors such as government, financial services, and defense,’ says Filip Marchal, lead private cloud at Proximus NXT, the IT service provider of Proximus.
Laurens van Reijen of LCL, a company that operates several data centers in our country, also sees the interest in local solutions increasing. He links this, among other things, to the controversial actions of tech billionaire Elon Musk, who gained access to the social security data of millions of Americans with his pseudo-ministry DOGE. ‘It showed that our data is not as safe as you might think.’
However, saying goodbye to American technology is easier said than done. Countless European organizations have become customers of the American ‘hyperscalers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud over the past two decades, which offer data infrastructure on a large and flexible scale. It is an attractive model for companies that want to scale up quickly and without large IT investments – just think of the many start-ups that offer software services ‘in the cloud’.
Microsoft Office
The result is that they are now stuck with the technology, the standards, and the prices that these hyperscalers impose on them. This problem is known as ‘lock-in’: tech companies lure you with an attractive offer, but make it increasingly difficult and expensive to escape their grip afterwards. ‘The entire IT sector is in a ‘drug dealer model’: first it’s free, but once you’re addicted, they make it more expensive,’ says independent IT consultant Jan Guldentops. ‘Microsoft’s office software is a typical example of this. In the 90s, customers were lured with Microsoft Office, today with Microsoft 365
(where you no longer buy a software package but take out a subscription, ed.). And once you’re stuck with it, you’re financially milked by Microsoft.’
Nevertheless, Guldentops, who is also a deputy member of the Flemish Supervisory Commission, the regional privacy watchdog, sees that things are starting to move. ‘More and more Flemish municipalities and OCMWs (Public Centres for Social Welfare) are looking into whether they can break away from the hyperscalers. Thanks to Trump, the naivety is finally disappearing.’
Not cheap
In our neighboring countries, too, the government is taking steps to cut ties with American tech suppliers. In the Netherlands, a report from the General Court of Audit in January slammed the government’s thoughtless use of public, mainly American, cloud services. The government is now working hard on a plan to make the government independent of providers from the US.
One of the new buzzwords in the IT world is the ‘sovereign cloud’: a cloud infrastructure that is completely disconnected from the hyperscalers, managed by European companies, and where the data remains under the control of a sovereign government. Proximus and the Luxembourg network operator LuxConnect developed such a service, named Clarence, for the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Somewhat surprisingly, Clarence partly consists of technology developed by Google: Google Distributed Cloud Air-Gapped is a cloud solution that uses the same tools and architecture as Google Cloud, but is still completely separate from the servers of the American tech giant.
‘A sovereign cloud is not cheap, but it is watertight,’ says Gwénaëlle Hervé, public & sovereign cloud lead at Proximus NXT. ‘It is a solution for customers who want the highest level of technological sovereignty. We have seen increasing interest in it since Trump’s election.’
Between working entirely with hyperscalers and completely decoupling, there are many gradations. These are often referred to by the term ‘hybrid cloud’, a mix of public cloud infrastructure and proprietary infrastructure. You can then work with your own data centers, which is only feasible for larger organizations, or use the data centers of a local provider such as LCL.
The Belgian IT group Cegeka, among others, has long been focusing on these hybrid or ‘multicloud solutions’. ‘We want to be able to offer our customers different options. It is our job to explain the consequences of each choice to them,’ say Annelore Buijs (executive vice-president Europe) and Gaetan Willems (global vice-president hybrid cloud). They too have noticed for several years that more and more customers are supplementing the hyperscalers with a multicloud approach.
‘Regulating away’
‘European regulation has so far mainly been intended to keep American tech players in check. Now the time has come to support European investment and innovation,’ adds Willems. ‘We have good scientists and engineers and innovative companies, but it is all still too fragmented.’
This concern is widely shared in the industry. A hundred European companies and interest groups, including Proximus, called on the European Commission in a letter last month to work on digital autonomy. ‘Europe cannot ‘regulate away’ its backlog. It is time for radical action,’ it says.
It’s not that nothing is happening. For example, Europe is working on a kind of technical and legal certification for European cloud providers (EUCS or EU Cloud Services Scheme). But there is still much discussion, including about whether American players can also join and how strict the criteria should be. ‘This regulation has been in the works for almost five years, while we need it now,’ says Hervé.
Another initiative that has been around for several years is Gaia-X, initially a project of large French and German companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and SAP to create a sovereign European data infrastructure through collaboration and shared standards. A good idea on paper, but from the very beginning there was a lot of criticism because American and Chinese players were also allowed to participate, and its operation was paralyzed by internal political discussions. Gaia-X has not yet delivered many concrete projects.
More recent is EuroStack, an initiative of a group of politicians, academics, and entrepreneurs to develop an autonomous European digital infrastructure. The agenda includes more than just cloud services: EuroStack is also about the development of its own AI services, European chips, and shared applications.
AI gigafactories
The new European Commissioner for Technological Sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, is also doing her part. Last week, she unveiled a plan to build up to five ‘AI gigafactories’ in the EU in the coming years. These are data centers that are about four times more powerful than the existing infrastructure and where large AI models can be developed. The plan also includes support for investments in extra cloud capacity and data centers. Virkkunen is working on an EU Cloud and AI Development Act, a series of proposals to speed up the issuance of permits for data centers.
All the ambitious plans indicate that Brussels is also beginning to see the importance of technological sovereignty. But at the end of the day, it will be the end-users who set the pace. As long as European companies and consumers continue to entrust their software and data to the American tech giants, the economic incentive to come up with a fully-fledged own alternative is lacking.
Not only the government in Europe, but also the one in the US therefore plays a crucial role. If Trump continues to make things as difficult in the coming years as he did in his first three months, it might encourage European users to finally be a little more conscious about their digital assets.