I'm not sure if that'd fully alleviate the risk for EU companies & governments, but I'd imagine it alleviates some of it.
The real question is where the CEO lives and whether their family and kids are susceptible to being kidnapped by the US govt.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone given that it is an American company. Being a multinational corporation like Microsoft or Mercedes Benz means you have to navigate rather complex legal situations, follow not just your home country's laws, but also the laws of the countries that you are operating in.
Plus, hiring for AWS / Azure / GCP experience is still much higher than for the smaller EU clouds.
The fundamental risk for the EU is the Cloud Act. Since that facility is still owned by a company that is owned by a US company, the Cloud Act applies.
Microsoft tried a similar thing in Germany and it failed.
I personally would be open to trying to change that, but I keep looking at the EU and they don't want to. Many countries are actively hostile to entrepreneurs and eg can charge taxes/fees/exit fees on unrealized cap gains. etc.
I’m an EU citizen, and think life generally was better in Belgium. But the salaries being so poor means I’m unlikely to move back.
They don't seem to want to :shrug:
If it did, and the US ordered Amazon to shut down the region, would it?
If the region kept on operating, and the US ordered Amazon to stop providing software updates, security updates, new license keys, etc. - how long could the region keep running?
How many times have we heard that? He owns the party, the courts, the legislature, and the guns.
Lots of talk, but how much action?
People are still building things that depend on American cloud, American controlled OSes (especially for mobile), American supplied hardware, American cloud services (especially AI) and the moves away are tiny by contrast.
Directly from the Windows Forum.
https://www.slashgear.com/1888658/microsoft-office-alternati...
Government's in Denmark, Germany, Spain (on the state level )
A couple more links for companies, but I trust the above is enough? The trend is definitely there and picking up speed.
Edit: a couple of days ago there was a post on HN about SAP spending 20b on cloud https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/sap_sovereign_cloud/
1. Denmark’s Ministry for Digital Affairs
2. Two Danish cities
3. One German state
4. The Italian Ministry of defence
5. One Spanish region
They also say French education ministry advised schools to move off the free versions of the "free versions" of MS Office 365 and Google Docs. They do not say anything about how many schools followed the advice, or what they moved to (a paid version of the same? another American supplier?).
Not much for a whole continent.
There will be a lot of resistance to any change. There will be a lot of people like this making the same arguments made here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/debate_for_microsoft_...
Microsoft has successfully had such decisions reversed in the past:
https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...
Things are different now too because they are not the same, sure. I don't know that people who got it quite wrong are the ones to trust when it comes to predictions of trading and economics this time around.
> Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.
No doubt a lot of people have changed their minds about visiting US due to Trump -
"Overseas arrivals fell 3.4% in June compared to a year ago, bringing the YTD decline to 1.2%."
But I don't think those kinds of swings are much evidence for larger trade and investment and data sovereignty etc issues.
Everybody, EU, UK, China, Japan, India, Australia, well really just about all countries -- have made a lot of noise and care a lot about relying on US tech, having US companies and by extension the US government control their data, etc. This isn't something they've just started to try fixing in 2016 "because Trump", or in 2025 "because this time he means it". It's been much longer than that. With the exception of probably only China, nobody has been able to make a great deal of progress on it.
Until very recently the USA was the preferred technology partner for many EU ventures and was seen as a trustworthy ally because of mutual history since 1945.
> If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other.
A lot more than what? And what exactly did Europe do in recent times that would give American citizens that feeling?
> It hasn’t been a century since they tried to genocide each other
This is a complete nonsense statement.
What does this mean? Like “the nationalists” would start taking away domain names of people they don’t like or something?
Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS in spite of massive lock-in because the feeling that the USA is a trustworthy partner is completely gone. You can't just 'joke about invading Greenland' and expect everybody to move on as if it didn't happen. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't just local sample bias either, NL used to be pretty laid back when it came to silly details such as hosting providers and such.
How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?