How Resilient Is Europe's IT Instructure?
What if AWS, GPC and Azure wouldn't be there?
What if we face a world in which European companies would need to provide their own IT infrastructure—Would the continent we prepared for this?
Would European companies be able to run their own infrastructure in all verticals, from SMB to enterprise? As IT or software development professionals, AWS, GCP, and Azure became prominent in our daily lives.
Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, and GoDaddy are some U.S. players that shaped the market and are known to most people.
It is critical to view opinionated magic clouds like Vercel’s services here. European companies aren’t mentioned very often, but maybe this is about to change.
What would happen, if these providers were available for political, economic, or regulatory reasons?
A hypothetical question, but it came up often for us in the last years when discussing resilience and sustainability with our clients.
has stated his concerns about that lately on Substack. So I would like to invite him to lead you into the first article of a series of articles, videos based on interviews and expert insights.Foreword By from
Europe is falling behind in the global digital race. While the United States dominates cloud computing and AI, and China aggressively expands its technological footprint, Europe struggles to keep pace. We have no major cloud providers of our own.
If, for any reason, US cloud giants decided—or were forced—to limit their services in Europe, our options would be bleak. We could either revert to expensive, complex on-premises solutions or turn to Alibaba, a choice that is geopolitically and strategically unviable for most businesses.
The backbone of modern European industry—our startups, enterprises, and even public institutions—runs on American cloud infrastructure.
Without it, countless services would grind to a halt. The problem isn’t just dependency; it’s the absence of a serious European alternative.
And the reasons for this go beyond technical capability.
Simple problems, like hosting a website, are easy to solve. But when it comes to specialised services that require massive compute power—like training large language models or processing big data—Europeans have no choice.
The tools we need don’t exist here.
While American companies access ready-made, optimised solutions like managed AI platforms, serverless big data pipelines, and high-performance GPU clusters, Europeans must rent general-purpose servers and build everything from scratch on open-source tooling.
This is slow, expensive, and unsustainable. No business can compete under these conditions.
The Problem With Large Scale Infrastructure In Europe Today
Europe has long relied on US-based cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. These companies have deeply embedded themselves in the IT landscape, shaping how software is developed, deployed, and scaled. Their dominance makes them almost irreplaceable for businesses ranging from startups to enterprises.
Now, let’s be honest: Just a year ago, 9/10 companies defaulted to AWS, GPC, or Azure. Big and small ones alike. Even enterprises sceptical in the German field, who did everything on-premises, are now migrating to the public clouds.
However, with growing concerns around digital sovereignty, data privacy (GDPR), and geopolitical risks, the question arises: What happens if these providers become unavailable due to political, economic, or regulatory reasons? This is not just a theoretical discussion—it’s an ongoing debate among European companies looking to ensure resilience and long-term sustainability in their IT strategies.
Europe has strong foundations in cloud infrastructure, AI, and security, but still lacks the scale and innovation of US hyperscalers. While STACKIT, OVHcloud, and Hetzner provide alternatives, they fall short in serverless, AI infrastructure, and global-scale edge computing.
For now, businesses must balance sovereignty with capability—European cloud independence is growing, but not yet a proper replacement. The key question remains: Will Europe act fast enough or always play catch-up?
What Are European Companies Like STACKIT Planning To Catch Up?
European cloud providers have acknowledged the gap and are starting to take action. One of the most notable players is STACKIT (Schwarz Gruppe)1, which is working on building a cloud alternative with data centers within Europe. They focus on providing GDPR-compliant infrastructure, Kubernetes, managed databases, and networking solutions. While they don’t yet offer the same breadth of services as AWS or Azure, they are positioning themselves as a trusted alternative for companies prioritizing data sovereignty.
Other companies like OVHcloud (France), Hetzner (Germany), Scaleway (France), and Deutsche Telekom's T-Systems are also investing heavily in European cloud infrastructure. The question remains: Can they provide the same reliability, scalability, and ease of use that companies have expected from US providers?
How Is The Current Landscape Looking For Small-to-Medium-Sized Businesses?
For SMBs, the challenge is different. They don't necessarily need thousands of services but the basics to be reliable, scalable, and cost-effective. The core essentials include:
Compute: Kubernetes, VMs, and auto-scaling solutions
Storage: S3-compatible object storage, block storage, and databases
Networking: DNS, load balancing, and DDoS protection
Security & Compliance: GDPR-compliant identity management, auditing, and encryption
Many European providers already offer these basics, but the real problem is adoption, ease of use, and ecosystem maturity. Most SMBs don’t want to struggle with complicated integrations and half-baked services when AWS, GCP, or DigitalOcean work.
What Are Overarching Dependencies Like Cloudflare DNS, GoDaddy, and Their European Variants?
Beyond cloud compute and storage, key dependencies like DNS, domain registrars, and security services play a crucial role in modern IT infrastructure.
Cloudflare DNS & WAF Alternatives: European alternatives include Bunny.net (Slovenia), RcodeZero (Austria), and OVHcloud DNS. While these offer robust DNS and CDN services, they lack Cloudflare’s extensive global edge network and developer-friendly tools like Workers.
GoDaddy & Domain Registration: European alternatives include IONOS (Germany), Gandi.net (France), and Netcup (Germany), providing domain registration, SSL, and essential hosting services.
DDoS Protection & Security: While OVHcloud and Deutsche Telekom offer DDoS protection, they don’t match Cloudflare’s comprehensive security ecosystem.
The biggest issue is that while European alternatives exist, they lack their US counterparts' seamless integration and scale. Companies relying on these services must decide whether to accept performance, features, or compliance trade-offs.
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Europe’s AI Capabilities: Who Is Driving AI Development and AI Infrastructure?
Artificial Intelligence is a crucial battleground for digital independence. While the US leads with companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, Europe is making strides with its own AI development and infrastructure:
AI Development & LLMs:
Aleph Alpha (Germany): One of Europe’s most promising AI startups, developing sovereign AI models and NLP solutions.
Mistral AI (France): Focuses on building open-weight large language models, similar to Meta’s LLaMA series.
DeepMind (UK, but owned by Google): While technically a European company, its research and deployment are integrated with Google’s AI initiatives.
Hugging Face (France/US): Originally French, now a global AI model hub and ecosystem provider, essential for open-source AI research.
AI Infrastructure – Who Provides GPUs in Europe?
Scaleway (France): Offers GPU-accelerated instances for AI workloads, though not at the scale of AWS or Azure.
OVHcloud (France): Provides high-performance computing (HPC) and GPU-powered cloud instances, including support for AI training.
Hetzner (Germany): Known for dedicated servers, now expanding into AI-ready GPU offerings.
T-Systems (Germany): Aiming to provide sovereign AI computing power for enterprise and government applications.
European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC): A European Union-backed initiative to develop AI and supercomputing infrastructure across the continent.
Despite these efforts, Europe lacks a hyperscaler comparable to Google or AWS for large-scale AI training. GPU availability remains limited, and AI companies often still rely on US-based cloud providers for large-scale model training.
What Can Europe Already Do On Its Own?
Europe doesn’t need to reinvent everything. The continent already has strong players in specific verticals:
Hosting & Bare Metal: Hetzner, OVHcloud
Cloud & Kubernetes: STACKIT, Scaleway, Exoscale
Networking & CDN: Bunny.net (Slovenia), OVH DDoS protection
Email & Domains: IONOS (Germany), Gandi.net (France)
AI & Big Data: Aleph Alpha (Germany) for AI, OVHcloud for managed databases
European businesses can already operate independently of US cloud providers for standard workloads. However, the problem arises when companies need highly specialized services such as AI infrastructure (AWS Sagemaker, GCP Vertex AI), serverless functions (AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers), and managed data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake).
And What Europe Cannot Do.
Despite progress, Europe still lacks a genuine hyperscaler alternative that can compete with AWS, GCP, and Azure in:
Global-scale infrastructure: No European provider has the worldwide footprint of AWS’s 30+ regions.
Serverless & Edge computing: No equivalent to AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, or Vercel’s opinionated frontend cloud.
AI & ML at scale: Europe does not have an equivalent of GCP’s AI services or Azure’s OpenAI partnership.
Marketplace & Ecosystem: AWS and GCP have entire ecosystems of third-party integrations, SaaS solutions, and developer communities that European providers cannot match.
What’s Next?
This discussion is far from over. At CloudFest 2025 in Rust, we’ll be engaging with European cloud providers, policymakers, and businesses to explore:
Which companies are actively working on European cloud independence?
What are the biggest blockers preventing widespread adoption?
Can a European cloud compete with AWS, or should we focus on a multi-cloud strategy with a mix of US and EU providers?
The challenge is clear: If Europe wants digital independence, it must invest in competitive, developer-friendly, scalable cloud infrastructure. The question remains: Can it do so before the following global crisis forces businesses to rethink their IT strategy?
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