AWS parades orgs that took up its offer for Euro Sovereign Cloud
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AWS parades orgs that took up its offer for Euro Sovereign Cloud
Customers want their data kept and processed strictly within the EU
Dan Robinson
Dan<br>Robinson
Published<br>thu 21 May 2026 // 14:53 UTC
AWS is pushing its European Sovereign Cloud, revealing some<br>of the customers it has signed up to operate sensitive workloads on the<br>platform and the continent's over how much sovereign control over data the Amazon subsidiary really<br>offers.<br>The service became generally<br>available to European customers in January, amid growing alarm over the Trump administration’s open hostility to Europe and the continent's near-total dependence on US cloud platforms.<br>AWS claims the European Sovereign Cloud represents a<br>physically and logically separate cloud infrastructure, with all components<br>located entirely within the EU.
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It started with just a single Region, located in the state<br>of Brandenburg, Germany, but plans to extend its footprint across the EU.
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Organizations that have signed up for the<br>service include University Hospital Essen, Schufa, a German credit information bureau,<br>and smart energy and water meter biz Diehl Metering.<br>Schufa has built a new credit scoring system that uses the AWS<br>Cloud to hold the sensitive financial data of more than 69 million German<br>consumers, while Diehl is operating services such as monitoring and billing for<br>its public sector customers, helping critical infrastructure like waterworks<br>and municipal utilities to manage water and energy data from a single centralized<br>system.<br>University Hospital Essen says it is using the platform for working<br>with patient health data and also developing new AI technologies to improve<br>patient care.<br>“The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will support this mission<br>by allowing us to work with health data at scale, while meeting German and<br>European sovereignty expectations,” said Prof Jens Kleesiek, the hospital’s director of its<br>Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, in a statement.<br>There are, however, legitimate doubts about whether clouds operating<br>under the aegis of any US company can really offer full sovereignty in Europe. Concerns<br>often center on the US CLOUD Act, under which the authorities can compel any American<br>organization to provide access to data they hold - including data stored outside the United<br>States - subject to due legal process.<br>An AWS spokesperson told The Register earlier this<br>year that its European Sovereign Cloud includes multiple layers of protection –<br>legal, operational, and technical – to safeguard data; that not even AWS<br>employees can access customer data; and that it provides advanced encryption to<br>allow customers to protect their content.
MORE CONTEXT
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A Microsoft executive was forced<br>to admit under oath in a French Senate inquiry last year that it cannot<br>guarantee data on French citizens would not be handed over to the American<br>government if requested, and the same US legal rules – namely, the US Cloud Act – apply to AWS.<br>“The AWS ESC is a fully isolated infrastructure with a<br>separate legal entity in Germany. Although it does offer a certain level of<br>legal insulation, it is still entirely owned by the US mother company. This is<br>an important limitation to its immunity from the CLOUD Act and other US-led prescriptions,”<br>said Forrester senior analyst Dario Maisto.
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Technology biz Thales unveiled on Thursday that it is launching its own European sovereign cloud<br>service in Germany, working with Google Cloud.<br>This is based on the model already used by S3NS, a Thales subsidiary, whereby Google<br>Cloud software and services are operated on dedicated local infrastructure controlled by a local entity.<br>In this case, Thales<br>says it will be a new German entity, legally and operationally independent from<br>Google Cloud, that will be staffed and managed by local German personnel. It is<br>available in preview now and aims for general availability by the end of 2026.<br>This new<br>arrangement is perhaps because there are still doubts over whether the S3NS<br>platform is entirely free from potential CLOUD Act<br>interference.<br>“The joint venture between Thales and Google - S3NS - offers<br>(some) Google services on French sovereign infrastructure. The JV is owned for<br>its vast majority by Thales, which is basically a French government-owned<br>company. This legal configuration grants much better legal insulation and<br>immunity from the CLOUD Act, although this is yet to be tested in court since<br>Google still has a minority share,” Forrester's Maisto told The Register.<br>The CLOUD Act worries have little to do with...