09/11/2026
As the EU strives to reduce its dependencies on US technologies, the question of how much that would cost unveils yet another effort by US companies to discourage the EU from breaking free from them.
CCIA Europe – a trade association whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta – has funded research claiming that stricter sovereignty rules for cloud and AI providers could cost Europe €115 billion over ten years. That is more than six times the Commission’s upper estimate of €18 billion. The report points to three gaps in the Commission’s assessment:
- €33.3 billion in direct public budget exposure
- the cost of redesigning software and rewriting code
- up to €80 billion in spillover costs for the private sector
Some of these concerns are serious. Migrating hospitals, banks and public agencies off systems built around specific cloud platforms is expensive and slow. But the lobby’s proposed fix is intended to preserve as much US market shares as possible.
CCIA Europe wants sovereignty rules – the requirements on who controls a cloud service, designed to ensure that European public data isn’t exposed to foreign laws or to the decisions of providers that Europe can’t hold accountable – limited to a narrow set of sensitive workloads, meaning cloud services where a specific public-order risk can be demonstrated. It also wants companies from countries with EU procurement commitments exempted from origin-based checks. That would keep the biggest US cloud providers in the race for European public contracts.
The “forgotten” cost
The €115 billion figure doesn’t count what dependency already costs.
Jurgita Misevičiūtė, head of public policy at Proton – a European privacy-focused digital services provider – says European businesses and governments send well over €11.5 billion a year to US cloud giants. That money strengthens the companies Europe is trying to stop relying on, and it leaves European competitors short of the scale they need to challenge them. Moreover, the US CLOUD Act lets American authorities demand data held by US companies, even when it is stored outside the US. “Sovereign” cloud offerings from US providers don’t change who they answer to.
Policymakers should rely on independent data and weigh industry-funded studies as advocacy input rather than neutral assessments. Everyone should know who pays for “the evidence” and who is meeting whom. Civil society, SMEs, public-sector users and European providers deserve the same access as the largest incumbents.