Europe's latest cloud sovereignty push isn't a new idea—it's the same play they've run every few years since the Snowden revelations, except now they're pretending GDPR fines and the Schrems II ruling suddenly gave them the backbone to actually do it.

Here's what's actually happening: European regulators and politicians are once again telling companies that hosting data on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud is a national security risk and a compliance nightmare. The pitch is simple—build your infrastructure on EU-native clouds like OVHcloud, Scaleway, or the Gaia-X fever dream that's been "launching" since 2020. The problem? This is the tech equivalent of telling everyone to switch from iPhones to European smartphones. Noble goal, terrible execution, and about five years too late.

This is really about Europe finally waking up to the fact that they handed the keys to their entire digital economy to three American companies, and now they're locked in harder than a SaaS customer on year three of a Salesforce contract. The cloud hyperscalers aren't just infrastructure—they're the new utilities, except instead of electricity you can shut off, it's an entire ecosystem of services, APIs, and tooling that would take billions and years to replicate. Good luck migrating when your engineering team has spent the last decade building on Lambda functions and S3 buckets.

We've seen this movie before. Remember when Europe was going to build competitors to Google and Facebook? How'd that work out? Remember Qwant, the "European Google"? Still there, technically alive, with the market share of a rounding error. The problem isn't ambition—it's that Europe keeps trying to regulate their way to tech supremacy instead of building products developers actually want to use. You can't compliance-mandate your way to cloud dominance when AWS has a decade head start and an ecosystem so sticky that CTOs would rather quit than migrate off it.

The uncomfortable truth nobody wants to say out loud: most European companies don't actually care that much about data sovereignty until they get slapped with a fine or read a scary headline about US intelligence access. When your engineering team has to choose between spinning up infrastructure in 30 seconds on AWS or filing paperwork and waiting three weeks for OVHcloud to provision something, sovereignty suddenly becomes negotiable. Developers optimize for velocity, not national pride.

But here's where it gets interesting—this might actually stick this time, not because European clouds got better, but because the US government keeps giving Europe ammunition. Every CLOUD Act expansion, every FISA court ruling, every time a US tech company hands over data to intelligence agencies, it's free marketing for the "digital sovereignty" pitch. And with AI model training becoming a strategic resource, suddenly the idea of having compute infrastructure outside US jurisdiction starts looking less like protectionism and more like basic geopolitical hedging.

The real money play isn't European companies voluntarily migrating—it's governments mandating it for public sector contracts and regulated industries. Healthcare, finance, defense—that's where this actually has teeth. The private sector will drag their feet until compliance costs exceed migration costs, which, given how Brussels writes regulations, might actually happen.

So what we're watching is the slow-motion balkanization of the cloud, where "global infrastructure" starts getting carved up along the same geopolitical lines as everything else. China already did it. Russia tried. Now Europe wants their own walled garden, except they're trying to build it with a decade less investment, half the engineering talent, and a regulatory framework designed by people who think "the cloud" is just someone else's computer.

The funniest part? Even if this works, European companies will end up running hybrid setups—critical data on EU clouds, everything else on AWS—which means they'll pay twice for infrastructure and still be dependent on American tech giants. That's not sovereignty, that's just expensive compliance theater with extra steps.