A success for Ulrich Ahle, this meeting however seems a long way from the initial project. Or at least from its French vision, since born from an initiative between Paris and Berlin. “The Germans are used to working with American giants, while in France, there was a real desire to build a sovereign European cloud”regrets Yann Lechelle, CEO of Scaleway, cloud provider, at the time of the launch of the consortium. Developing an independent solution is complex. This must meet strict data protection requirements which must be hosted in the country concerned. Yann Lechelle has also decided to leave Gaia-X after a few months. “We are tenants of the Americans”he sighs.
OVH European leader
As a result of these divergences, Europe is lagging behind, and with this accumulated delay, the leaders Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who hold 65% of the market in the area, have gained time. From now on, the strategy of the 27 remains to be defined. And Yann Lechelle continues: “The idea of American-style protectionism is frowned upon on the Old Continent,” whose shortcomings were highlighted in the Draghi report. The document does not mince its words: the Union missed the first digital revolution with the Internet and is struggling to invest in the technologies of tomorrow. It highlights the need to provide the necessary investments and skills to the different actors in order to “take advantage of new technologies”. With a touch of cynicism, MP Philippe Latombe (MoDem) emphasizes that “the election of Donald Trump in the United States could wake up Europe”.
However, this has nothing to be ashamed of, with the historic French OVH, considered the European leader. “We generate 52% of our turnover internationally and invest 350 million euros per year in R&D”says Benjamin Revcolevschi, the new CEO. However, there is something of a glass ceiling, with OVH struggling to exceed one billion in turnover. The company puts “on business awareness” who wish to turn to truly sovereign solutions.
Across the Rhine, another unexpected actor has exploded in recent months. Digits, a subsidiary of Schwarz, owner of Lidl, achieved a turnover of around 2 billion euros in 2023. Launched in 2021 for the group’s internal needs in terms of data sovereignty and confidentiality, it took a minority stake in Aleph Alpha, a German start-up specializing in artificial intelligence, and counts among its clients its compatriot SAP, the software giant.
The trusted cloud
National projects are therefore trying to rekindle the flame. In France, initiatives bringing together several stakeholders are also emerging. After the crash of Cloudwatt, a sovereign cloud project led by Orange Business and stopped in 2020, or of Numergy launched by SFR, new attempts are being made. The NumSpot platform, offered by Docaposte, Dassault, Bouygues and Banque des Territoires, will be marketed in the first quarter of 2025. There is no question here of competing with the American giants, but rather of “offer a complementary controlled cloud solution”according to Guillaume Poupard, deputy director of Docaposte. “I avoid the term sovereignty, which rather applies to States. Although initially, the question arose of launching at the European level”admits the former boss of the National Information Systems Security Agency. The solution is based on Outscale’s infrastructure, French service provider, and already has around forty clients. It specifically targets companies whose data is sensitive, such as the health or banking sectors.
-If a sovereign solution struggles to emerge, other projects are turning to the trusted cloud. Like Bleu, the result of a collaboration between Orange, Capgemini and Microsoft, or S3NS, a project associating Thales with Google. Less strict on data localization, the trusted cloud must however meet a certain number of regulatory requirements for securing it.. All these names are used directly by non-European actors. Like Oracle, which announced the launch of an offer “meeting European requirements in terms of confidentiality and sovereignty”, or from Amazon, with AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Caught between Americans and Chinese, Europe must still build a real strategy. And demand is strong, with research firm IDC predicting that global spending on sovereign cloud solutions is expected to reach $258 billion by 2027.
The United States makes the law on the Old ContinentIn the battle between it and the United States over the protection of private data, Europe is struggling to exist in the face of the principle of extraterritoriality of American laws. Companies in the country still have an obligation to provide data if Washington’s intelligence services request it, in very specific cases. Since 2023, the transfer of data between the two sides of the Atlantic has been governed by the Data Privacy Framework, a bilateral agreement which succeeded two texts invalidated by the Court of Justice of the European Union. But here again, the legal solidity of this text is contested and its lifespan uncertain. Europe lacks arguments against the United States, whose services largely host its companies’ data. And the proliferation of legislation does not make it possible to stimulate the European offer in terms of the cloud either. A vicious circle from which the Old Continent cannot escape. And in the end, America wins.
