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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Yes, Europe is actively developing alternatives to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—but it is not yet replacing them wholesale. The practical shift is toward European providers for sensitive or portable workloads, alongside hybrid and multicloud architectures that preserve access to hyperscaler services where no equivalent exists.
For businesses, governments and investors, the important question is not which provider is “the European AWS.” It is which provider can deliver the required combination of sovereignty, reliability, services, price and portability for a particular workload.
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Why Europe wants alternatives now
Cloud infrastructure has become foundational to government systems, financial services, healthcare, industrial data, artificial intelligence, research and public administration. Dependence on a small number of US companies therefore creates more than a routine procurement concern: it creates strategic and bargaining risks.
The European Commission describes technological sovereignty as the ability to act independently in the digital sphere by developing and controlling critical technologies, data and infrastructure. Cloud is central to that policy.
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European buyers are responding to four overlapping pressures:
- Digital sovereignty: Governments and regulated industries want greater control over critical infrastructure.
- Concentration: Buyers are concerned about switching barriers, interoperability, data access, bundling and contractual terms. The Commission has investigated these issues under the Digital Markets Act. See the Commission’s cloud-market investigation.
- Geopolitical resilience: Sanctions, export controls, trade disputes or changes in cross-border data policy could affect access to foreign suppliers.
- Regulatory pressure: Customers must assess GDPR, sector-specific rules, national-security requirements, procurement rules and international data transfers.
This does not mean European companies are abandoning US clouds. It means they are seeking negotiating leverage, alternative suppliers and a way to keep the most sensitive workloads under stronger European control.
Europe’s sovereign-cloud push
In April 2026, the European Commission awarded a sovereign-cloud procurement framework worth up to €180 million over six years. The selected provider groupings included STACKIT, Scaleway, Post Telecom with Clever Cloud and OVHcloud, and Proximus with S3NS, Clarence and Mistral. Eligibility required at least the Commission’s SEAL-2 data-sovereignty level, while several successful bidders reached SEAL-3. Read the Commission’s announcement.
The Commission has also proposed a Cloud and AI Development Act that aims to at least triple EU data-centre capacity within five to seven years and introduces four cloud-and-AI sovereignty assurance levels for public-sector risk assessment.
These measures show strong political commitment. They do not prove that Europe already has one provider matching the global scale, service breadth and ecosystem of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
“European cloud” can mean several different things
Location alone is not enough to answer a sovereignty question. A cloud service can be hosted in Europe while its provider, operators, software suppliers or legal obligations remain international.
| Objective | What it means |
|---|---|
| Data residency | Data is stored in European data centres. This is the narrowest form of European hosting. |
| European ownership | The provider is headquartered and controlled in Europe. |
| Operational sovereignty | European entities and personnel operate the service, including support, administration and incident response. |
| Legal sovereignty | The customer seeks to reduce exposure to non-European laws and foreign government-access demands. |
| Technological sovereignty | The architecture avoids excessive dependence on proprietary foreign APIs, software or hardware. |
A buyer should ask who owns the provider, who can access systems, which subcontractors are involved, who controls encryption keys, which laws apply, what software powers the service and how data can be exported.
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“GDPR-compliant” is not a universal technical label. Compliance depends on the processing activity, contract, configuration, security controls and customer’s own responsibilities. Likewise, a certification may apply only to a named product, region, operating model or customer class.
The main European alternatives
OVHcloud: broad infrastructure and regulated French workloads
OVHcloud is one of the most obvious European alternatives for general-purpose infrastructure. Its portfolio includes public cloud, virtual machines, bare metal, object storage, Kubernetes, databases and data services.
For sensitive French workloads, OVHcloud advertises a SecNumCloud-qualified environment with Amazon S3 compatibility. S3 compatibility can ease migration for object-storage applications, although it does not make every surrounding service interchangeable with AWS.
OVHcloud’s advantages are breadth, European regions and a route into regulated infrastructure. Its limitations are equally important: the catalogue is narrower than the leading hyperscalers, and customers may need to assemble more components themselves. SecNumCloud availability should be checked for the exact product and region rather than generalized across the company.
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Scaleway: developer-oriented public cloud
Scaleway offers compute, storage, managed databases, Kubernetes and AI-related infrastructure with a developer-facing public-cloud model. It describes itself as a European provider and markets controls intended to address GDPR obligations and exposure to non-European extraterritorial laws. Those are provider claims, not a blanket independent legal conclusion. Review its security and compliance information.
Scaleway can suit European startups and teams that want more managed functionality than basic virtual-machine hosting. Its trade-offs include a smaller service catalogue than AWS or Azure, region-dependent availability and potentially constrained access to specialized AI hardware.
Scaleway announced a pricing change effective June 1, 2026. Prices should therefore be checked in the live pricing information rather than copied from an old comparison.
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Hetzner: inexpensive, infrastructure-focused hosting
Hetzner is best viewed as a cost-conscious infrastructure provider, not a full hyperscaler replacement. Its European Cloud product focuses on virtual machines, hourly billing and European locations. It also cites DIN ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification and states that customer data is not transferred to third countries; buyers should verify those claims against the exact product and contract. See Hetzner’s European Cloud details.
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A cheap virtual machine is not necessarily a cheap equivalent to a managed AWS or Azure workload. The comparison must include the staff and software needed to operate the missing services.
STACKIT: enterprise and public-sector sovereignty
STACKIT, backed by the Schwarz Group, is particularly relevant to enterprise and public-sector buyers seeking a sovereignty-focused provider. Its inclusion in the Commission’s 2026 procurement framework is evidence of institutional credibility, but not a universal endorsement for every commercial workload.
Buyers should verify ordinary commercial availability, regions, certifications, support arrangements, managed services and export options. STACKIT may be more naturally suited to large procurement processes than to a small developer seeking instant self-service infrastructure.
Open Telekom Cloud and T-Systems
Open Telekom Cloud and T-Systems are enterprise-oriented candidates whose relevance is strongest where customers value German and European procurement relationships, managed infrastructure, public-sector experience and compliance-heavy operations.
They should be compared against a specific workload and contract. They are not automatically direct replacements for every developer-facing AWS, Azure or Google Cloud service.
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3DS OUTSCALE belongs in the specialist and enterprise segment of the sovereign-cloud market, particularly for regulated and industrial workloads. It may be a credible fit where governance and enterprise integration matter more than a broad consumer-style catalogue, but it should not be presented as a universal replacement.
Partner-based sovereign models
The Proximus grouping illustrates why a provider’s headquarters do not tell the whole story. The grouping includes S3NS, a Thales–Google Cloud joint venture, alongside Clarence and Mistral. Buyers must examine the complete ownership, technology, operational and subcontractor chain. The Commission’s procurement document lists the selected groupings.
What European providers can replace
European providers are already credible options for many core infrastructure workloads:
| Workload | Replacement difficulty | Likely European options |
|---|---|---|
| Linux virtual machines | Low | Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway |
| Dedicated servers | Low | Hetzner, OVHcloud |
| Object storage | Low to medium | OVHcloud, Scaleway and other providers |
| Kubernetes and containers | Medium | Scaleway, OVHcloud, STACKIT |
| Standard PostgreSQL databases | Medium | Several European providers; managed features must be checked |
| Serverless applications | Medium to high | Usually requires provider-specific redesign |
| Data warehouses | High | Often requires a hybrid design |
| Large-scale AI training | High | Depends on GPU supply, networking and model ecosystem |
| Global edge delivery | Medium to high | May require a multicloud or CDN strategy |
| Highly regulated public-sector systems | Medium | Certified sovereign environments |
A 2026 European Parliament technical assessment found broadly equivalent offerings in core categories such as compute, storage, networking and managed container orchestration, while noting that European providers generally offer fewer services than the largest US hyperscalers. Read the assessment.
The crucial distinction is between infrastructure equivalence and platform equivalence. A provider may offer an S3-compatible object store or managed Kubernetes without matching the identity, serverless, analytics, observability, marketplace and AI services that surround those products at hyperscaler scale.
An indicative technical comparison cited by the European Parliament put OVHcloud and Scaleway at roughly 80 services each versus about 200 for AWS. Counts vary by definition and date, so this is not a permanent ranking. See the technical document.
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Cloud decisions should be made using total cost of ownership, not the lowest advertised virtual-machine price. Include:
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- Compute, storage and snapshots
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- Managed databases and Kubernetes control planes
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- Network egress and data-transfer charges
- Migration engineering and dual-running systems
- Compliance validation and audits
- Staff time for operations and incident response
For a dated illustration, OVHcloud listed a German b3-8 instance at €0.0512 excluding VAT per hour on a page marked “Price on April 1, 2026”—about €37.38 for 730 hours before additional charges. That figure is not a complete workload price. Check the current OVHcloud pricing page.
Sovereignty can also cost more because of dedicated infrastructure, segregated operations, restricted personnel access, certifications and smaller economies of scale. A limited January 2026 comparison cited by the European Parliament found selected AWS European Sovereign Cloud services averaged approximately 15% more than comparable services in AWS’s Frankfurt region across six services. This is not a market-wide conclusion. Review the source and its methodology.
How to evaluate a European cloud
- Inventory the workload: Separate compute, databases, storage, Kubernetes, identity, messaging, analytics, AI, monitoring, security and backup.
- Identify proprietary dependencies: Look for Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Functions, DynamoDB, Cosmos DB, Bigtable, proprietary queues, vendor-specific IAM, data warehouses and machine-learning pipelines.
- Define the sovereignty requirement: Specify data location, ownership, operator location, applicable law, encryption-key control and subcontractor restrictions.
- Model the complete cost: Compare the services and staff needed to achieve the same availability, backup, security and recovery objectives.
- Run a pilot: Test performance, support, monitoring, backups, restore procedures, failure handling and data export.
- Test the exit: Export databases and objects into documented formats and measure the time, bandwidth and engineering effort required to restore elsewhere.
Portability is usually easiest with Linux, containers, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, S3-compatible storage, infrastructure-as-code and OpenTelemetry. These technologies help, but they do not eliminate lock-in created by networking, identity, database extensions, pricing structures or proprietary operational tooling.
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Full migration, hybrid cloud or multicloud?
Full migration
A full move can make sense when the workload is technically portable, European sovereignty is a hard requirement and the organization can operate a smaller managed-service catalogue.
Hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud is often the most realistic option. Sensitive data and ordinary application hosting can use European infrastructure, while global delivery, advanced analytics or specialized AI remains with a hyperscaler where regulations permit it.
Multicloud
Multicloud can improve bargaining power and resilience when the architecture supports substitution. It also adds contracts, identity relationships, monitoring systems, operational skills and failure modes. It is not automatically safer or cheaper.
When a European provider is likely to be the better choice
- European operational or legal control is a hard requirement.
- The application primarily uses standard infrastructure.
- The team can accept fewer managed services or has the skills to operate them.
- The customer wants leverage in negotiations with hyperscalers.
- European performance and regions are sufficient.
- The business values predictable infrastructure pricing and a documented exit path.
When a US hyperscaler may still be rational
- The application depends on proprietary databases, serverless, analytics or AI services.
- The business needs a broad global footprint and multiple disaster-recovery regions.
- The organization lacks the staff to replace managed services.
- An existing enterprise agreement materially changes the total cost.
- The required regulatory and contractual controls can be satisfied without a full provider change.
Bottom line
Europe has real alternatives for virtual machines, storage, containers, conventional databases and many regulated workloads. OVHcloud and Scaleway are broad public-cloud candidates; Hetzner is attractive for cost-conscious, self-managed infrastructure; STACKIT, Open Telekom Cloud, T-Systems, 3DS OUTSCALE and sovereign partner models are more relevant to enterprise and public-sector procurement.
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But no single European provider currently matches AWS, Azure or Google Cloud across the entire platform stack and global footprint. For most organizations, the strongest strategy is selective rather than ideological: place sensitive and portable workloads with a suitable European provider, keep difficult-to-replace services where they create genuine value, and build tested portability into the architecture.
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