By

• Kim Loohuis

Published: 20 Jun 2025 14:36

When Dutch hosting provider mijn.host launched what it claimed was “one of the Netherlands’ first digitally sovereign public clouds” late last year, it struck a chord with a growing European anxiety.

Built entirely on open source Apache CloudStack technology and hosted exclusively within Dutch borders, the platform promised businesses a genuine alternative to American cloud giants amid rising geopolitical tensions. 

Yet according to independent ICT expert Bert Hubert, such initiatives, while admirable, represent little more than digital window dressing.

“These are quite suitable if you’re a pigeon racing association and want to put your pigeon racing association website there,” he said. “But if you come along saying, ‘I’m Rabobank and I want to outsource my banking operations to you’, you’re not going to engage with a hosting provider that says, ‘We have an offer for €5 per month’.” 

The harsh assessment reflects a broader reality facing Europe’s digital sovereignty ambitions: the chasm between political rhetoric and technological capability has never been wider.

As American cloud providers such as AWS announce new European entities claiming sovereign operations, the question becomes whether Europe’s homegrown alternatives can ever bridge the gap between aspiration and enterprise-grade reality. 

Scale matters more than sovereignty 

Hubert’s criticism cuts to the heart of the European cloud dilemma. While the Netherlands hosts several credible providers – notably LeaseWeb, which generates around €235m in annual revenue and operates more than 80,000 servers – they excel primarily in infrastructure basics rather than the sophisticated services modern businesses demand.

“Traditional Dutch and European hosting companies were excellent at the bottom layers, even among the world’s best,” Hubert said. “But once you want to rent a database instead of a server, it quickly becomes: ‘We can arrange that, but you’ll need to call.’ Meanwhile, American providers offer instant access with a single click.” 

Hubert described this gap as a “cloud ladder” of complexity. While European providers excel at the foundational layers – basic compute and storage – they struggle at higher levels of the stack, where hyperscalers offer integrated services such as databases, AI platforms, and orchestration tools.

“European firms are selling timber,” he added, “when customers want ready-made furniture.” 

Marijn Vlug, founder of mijn.host, acknowledged these limitations with refreshing candour: “A fully fledged alternative to Amazon or Microsoft? That doesn’t exist here yet. Building something like that takes years, not months.”

His company, serving 25,000 customers since 2016, embodies the entrepreneurial spirit driving Dutch cloud initiatives, while also highlighting the constraints it faces. 

The open source question

Vlug’s commitment to open-source technology reflects a broader belief among European sovereignty advocates that transparency is equivalent to independence.

“Open source is the only real way to see where your data stands and how it’s managed,” he said. This philosophy underpins much of the European approach to digital sovereignty, from Europe’s GAIA-X initiative to individual national strategies. 

Yet Hubert provides crucial context on the role of open source in European collaboration: “Open source is not the solution itself, but I can guarantee that if you want to collaborate to build something beautiful and you don’t do it open source, then you’ll be dealing with lawyers until 2040 to arrange that collaboration.”

He points to an ironic example: despite being fierce competitors, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Apple all collaborate on Linux development, which then powers their respective cloud platforms.  This collaborative potential could theoretically enable European sovereignty, allowing hundreds of companies to offer standardised services while maintaining competitive differentiation.

“We have all these separate talents here in Europe,” Hubert said. “They could work together to say: ‘We also want to be able to offer a database in the cloud’.” 

Political momentum falters 

Yet the promise of European collaboration increasingly appears to be wishful thinking as political realities intrude. The Netherlands’ digital sovereignty agenda, once championed by state secretary for digitalisation Zsolt Szabó, effectively stalled with the government’s collapse in early June 2025.

According to Hubert, Szabó’s promised National Digitalisation Strategy contained “very little concrete guidance” and resembled “general statements about how important the cloud and the Netherlands are” rather than actionable policy. 

The Parliamentary initiative Clouds on the Horizon, which aimed to have at least 30% of government cloud services hosted by European providers by 2029, now hangs in limbo. More troubling for sovereignty advocates, Szabó had resisted calls for mandatory quotas, preferring voluntary measures that experts argue will perpetuate the status quo.

Hubert and others note that governments themselves are huge cloud customers and could create a healthy market simply by buying European products and running tenders that European suppliers could win. “Right now, anyone who is not Microsoft has a very hard time getting government business, which is not helpful,” added Hubert.  

The stakes of continued American dependence became tangible when Microsoft blocked the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s email account, though the exact circumstances remain unclear. For Haroon Sheikh, senior researcher at the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) and professor at VU, such incidents illustrate how American tech giants ultimately operate under American jurisdiction regardless of where their European data centres are located. 

“We make ourselves very easily blackmailable,” Sheikh warned. “In this grim geopolitical world, those kinds of risks will only get bigger if we don’t control a large part of the value chain ourselves.”

Perhaps more insidiously, dependency creates behavioural changes even before direct intervention occurs. “If you know someone might look at your phone, you send different WhatsApp messages,” Hubert said. “The mere possibility of American interference influences policy decisions, creating what amounts to anticipatory compliance with foreign interests.” 

American cloud providers haven’t ignored European sovereignty concerns. AWS recently announced plans for a fully European entity, while Oracle promotes its ‘sovereign cloud’ offerings across the continent. Yet sovereignty experts remain sceptical about the genuine independence of such initiatives. 

“As long as a company still has headquarters in America, they fall under the jurisdiction of the American government,” Sheikh explained. “And especially the current American government can force a lot of things.” This legal reality means that European subsidiaries of American companies offer limited protection against claims of extraterritorial jurisdiction. 

Economic reality bites 

For companies like mijn.host, the path forward involves gradual capability building rather than revolutionary breakthroughs. Vlug outlines plans to expand services, including object storage and managed Kubernetes, recognising that “a few years is realistic” for developing serious alternatives. Yet he also acknowledged that European collaboration might prove more effective than individual national efforts. 

The challenge extends beyond technology to economics. As the Dutch competition authority notes, European providers struggle against “the overwhelming scale that hyperscalers have for investments in renewing their cloud services and underlying infrastructure”. The resulting service offerings from American giants remain “superior in terms of comprehensiveness”. 

Moving beyond individual initiatives – whether new ventures like mijn.host, established players such as LeaseWeb, or corporate solutions like Lidl’s StackIt cloud division – Europe is actively pursuing broader efforts to reduce its digital dependence and foster greater autonomy.  

A key concept gaining traction is the EuroStack, a vision for a European-owned and operated technology stack. It aims to be the key to the European Union’s digital sovereignty and self-determination, advocating for enhanced collaboration among leading companies, scientists, policymakers, and civil society. 

Sheikh is a key contributor to the EuroStack vision. He emphasised that the cloud is perhaps Europe’s “greatest Achilles’ heel,” where its position is weakest, thus requiring the most concerted effort towards sovereignty. Sheikh’s work, including his book Atlas of the Digital World, describes a shift towards a “vertical world order” where digital layers (raw materials, chips, networks, cloud, intelligence, applications, connected devices) are globally interconnected, making it crucial to understand dependencies at each layer. 

Yet translating this vision into action faces institutional inertia that has persisted despite growing awareness of dependency risks.

“We haven’t had enough imagination in digital policy in Europe,” Sheikh said. He envisions coordinated investment where “KPN, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica all cooperate and invest a few billion each, with all European governments as first customers”.

Beyond wishful thinking 

As geopolitical tensions escalate and American digital dominance deepens, Europe’s digital sovereignty ambitions face a pivotal moment. Initiatives such as mijn.host demonstrate entrepreneurial determination and technical competence, but they also highlight the enormous gap between current capabilities and genuine independence from American cloud infrastructure. 

Sheikh’s warning carries urgency considering political instability across Europe: “We need to be fast in taking action. I hope the pressure from the Trump administration creates a sense of urgency.” Yet with Dutch sovereignty plans frozen and European collaboration remaining more aspiration than reality, the window for decisive action may be narrowing. 

The technology exists, Hubert confirmed, and European expertise remains world-class at infrastructure levels. But translating these strengths into comprehensive cloud alternatives requires sustained political commitment and coordinated investment that current fragmented efforts cannot provide. Until Europe moves beyond pilot projects to genuine scale, digital sovereignty will remain an expensive aspiration rather than a strategic reality. 

For now, companies seeking alternatives to American cloud providers can choose between limited European options that meet basic needs and comprehensive American platforms that define industry standards. As mijn.host and similar initiatives demonstrate, the former can work for specific use cases. But for enterprise-grade requirements that determine competitive advantage, the latter remains the only viable choice, sovereignty aspirations notwithstanding.