Opinion I’m an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn’t trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we’re simply not trustworthy.

In the Trump‑redux era of 2026, European enterprises are finally taking data seriously, and that means packing up from Redmond-by-Seattle and moving their most sensitive workloads home. This isn’t just compliance theater; it’s a straight‑up national economic security play.

Europe’s digital sovereignty paranoia, long waved off as regulatory chatter, is now feeding directly into procurement decisions. Gartner told The Reg last year that IT spending in Europe is set to grow by 11 percent in 2026, hitting $1.4 trillion, with a big chunk rolling into “sovereign cloud” options and on‑prem/edge architectures.

The kicker? Fully 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to increase their use of local cloud providers. More than half say geopolitics will prevent them from leaning further on US‑based hyperscalers.

The American hypercloud vendors have figured this out. AWS recently made its European Sovereign Cloud available. This AWS cloud, Amazon claims, is “entirely located within the EU, and physically and logically separate from other AWS Regions.” On top of that, EU residents will “independently operate it” and “be backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances, and legal protections designed to meet the needs of European governments and enterprises for sensitive data.”

Many EU-based companies aren’t pleased with this Euro-washing of American hypercloud services. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade association accuses the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework of being set up to favor the incumbent (American) hypercloud providers.

They’re not wrong.

You don’t need a DEA warrant or a Justice Department subpoena to see the trend: Europe’s 90‑plus‑percent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, as former European Commission advisor Cristina Caffarra put it, is a single‑shock‑event security nightmare waiting to rupture the EU’s digital stability.

Seriously. What will you do if Washington decides to unplug you? Say Trump gets up on the wrong side of the bed and decides to invade Greenland. There goes NATO, and in all the saber-rattling leading up to the 10th Mountain Division being shipped to Nuuk, he orders American companies to cut their services to all EU countries and the UK.

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With the way things are going, they’re not going to say no. I mean, CEOs Tim Cook of Apple, Eric Yuan of Zoom, Lisa Su of AMD, and – pay attention – Amazon’s Andy Jassy all went obediently to watch a feature-length White House screening of Melania, the universally-loathed, 104‑minute Amazon‑produced documentary about First Lady Melania Trump.

Sure, that’s a silly example, but for American companies to do business today, they’re kowtowing to Trump. Or, take a far more serious example, when Minnesota company CEOs called for “de-escalation” in the state, there was not one word about ICE or the government’s role in the bloodshed. It was the corporate equivalent of the mealy-mouthed “thoughts and prayers” American right-wingers always say after a US school shooting.

Some companies have already figured out which way the wind is blowing. Airbus, the European aerospace titan, has put out a €50 million, decade‑long tender to migrate its mission‑critical applications to a “sovereign European cloud.” Airbus wants its whole stack – data at rest, data in transit, logging, IAM, and security‑monitoring infrastructure – all rooted in EU law and overseen by EU operators. As Catherine Jestin, Airbus’s executive vice president of digital, told The Register: “We want to ensure this information remains under European control.”

Who can blame them? Thanks to the American CLOUD Act and related US surveillance statutes, US‑headquartered providers must hand over European data regardless of where the bytes sit. Exhibit A is that Microsoft has already conceded that it cannot guarantee data independence from US law enforcement. Airbus is betting that “data residency on paper” from AWS‑styled “EU sections” is not enough. Real sovereignty demands EU‑owned and run operations with full contractual and legal firewalls. Sure, your data may live in Frankfurt, but your fate still rests in Seattle, Redmond, or Mountain View if an American company owns your cloud provider.

Besides, do you really want some Trump apparatchik getting their hands on your data? I mean, this is a government where Madhu Gottumukkala, the acting director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, uploaded sensitive data into ChatGPT!

In response, Brussels is pushing an open source‑led exit from hyperscaler lock‑in. Ministries are standardizing on Nextcloud‑style collaboration stacks instead of Microsoft 365 to fund Euro‑native clouds via the European Cloud Alliance. Some countries, like France, are already shoving Zoom, Teams, and other US videoconferencing platforms out the door in favor of a local service.

If you’re running an EU‑based firm in 2026, the takeaway isn’t that AWS‑in‑Frankfurt is evil; it’s that for certain workloads, especially national security, industrial IP, or high‑profile consumer data franchises, EU‑native cloud and services are no longer a nice‑to‑have but a business continuity plan requirement.

It’s time to get serious about digital sovereignty. The clock is ticking, and there’s no telling when Trump will go off. ®