There is a word that has appeared in almost every announcement of a new data centre in Europe in recent years: ‘sovereign’. The infrastructure sits on European soil, so the data would be safe. But geographic location is only part of the story: if the ownership, operation and terms of use of that infrastructure answer to other jurisdictions, sovereignty remains on paper. That is the paradox behind EuroStack, the proposal for a strategic European digital infrastructure presented in early 2025 by a group of scholars and entrepreneurs from the sector.
The numbers behind the dependency
The document captures a dependency that is now structural along the entire digital value chain — chips, data, computing capacity, connectivity. The most telling figure concerns the cloud: European providers' share of the European market has fallen from around 26% in 2017 to 10% today. Meanwhile, according to the authors, European strategy has focused almost exclusively on regulation — a ‘digital referee’ role that has produced plenty of rules but little industrial capacity: alternatives are not created by decree, and several promising European players have ended up being acquired precisely by the large non-European operators.
What EuroStack proposes
The central thesis is that the alternative must be built and governed, not merely wished for. The document describes three layers on which to invest in a coordinated way:
- Physical infrastructure — chips, connectivity, high-performance computing (Europe has three of the world's top ten supercomputers, and one of them, Leonardo, is here in Bologna) and data centres: not only large facilities, but also decentralised solutions, edge and small-scale data centres;
- Logical infrastructure — digital identity (eIDAS), an interoperable and federable cloud, European AI engines trained on local languages and data;
- Intermediation — open transaction networks governed by their operators, as an alternative to proprietary platforms.
Alongside the technical layers, two industrial policy levers: ‘buy European’ requirements in public and private procurement, and investment measured on market outcomes — real adoption, not proofs of concept.
A federation of the small
The part that concerns us most directly: according to the document, there is neither the time nor the capital to build a ‘European hyperscaler’ from scratch. The path it points to is to federate the assets that already exist — the network of small and medium-sized providers — by making them interoperable: common APIs, open standards for virtualisation and containerisation, harmonised contractual terms, all the way to a hyper-distributed cloud that converges naturally towards the edge. And the distinctive strengths the document credits these operators with are exactly the ones we work on every day: controllability, compliance, proximity to the customer and integration built on open standards. It is no coincidence that our VDC GREEN was born on OpenStack roots going back to 2010, with data held exclusively in Italy.
What you can do today, without waiting for Brussels
EuroStack is an industrial policy proposal, and its fate will be decided between institutions and industry. But the logic behind it already applies to every infrastructure decision today:
- Ask who controls it, not just where it sits. The right question for your provider is not ‘which country is my data in?’, but ‘who owns the infrastructure, under which jurisdiction, and who can decide to switch it off or change its terms?’;
- Demand a way out. No lock-in, clear exit costs, open formats and standards: portability is negotiated on the way in, not on the way out;
- Consider a European provider for at least part of your needs. It is the bottom-up version of ‘buy European’: redundancy, resilience and negotiating power with your main supplier;
- For genuinely sensitive workloads, keep your own perimeter. It applies to data and it applies to AI: an on-premise RAG keeps company documents where they belong;
- If you are a public administration, sovereignty is already a requirement — not an option: qualifications, regulation and data sovereignty belong in your tender specifications.
Digital sovereignty, in short, cannot be bought with a European address: it is built through choices of architecture, contracts and suppliers. In our own small way, it is the road we have been travelling for fifteen years — and if you want to understand what it would mean for your infrastructure, let's talk.
Sources and references: #EuroStack: European Strategic Sovereign Digital Infrastructures — A Pitch Document (10 January 2025; with contributions by R. Berjon, C. Caffarra, F. Bonfiglio, V. Bertola, S. Toffaletti, K. Zenner and others); the EuroStack initiative presented to the European Parliament (September 2024); the Draghi report on European competitiveness (September 2024).
