There are no laws that force companies to store all (generic) data in Europe. If there were then the companies asking about migrations just now would already be in breach.

You’re probably thinking of PII (GDPR/EUDPR) and even there there are plenty of loopholes, creative interpretations, and “privacy shields”.

The push for sovereignty doesn’t just come from regulators, it comes from the companies themselves who lost trust in the US, and also from European providers who jumped on the opportunity to make a killing.

Not generic data, no. But there are laws for government data afaik.

His point is that those laws were basically ignored, until now.

The conversation started all the way back, with the Patriot Act, but until now the dynamic was roughly: politicians write lofty laws that pay lip service to data sovereignty, then add enough loopholes so that nothing has to change in practice, and nobody really cares.

Now people do care, and they don't want to use those loopholes. It's pretty obvious why things have changed.