America’s Cloud Act is spooking European Union leaders. The Cloud Act is a law that gives the US government authority to obtain digital data held by US-based tech corporations irrespective of whether that data is stored on servers at home or on foreign soil. Spooked by a lack of European technology champions to compete with the US giants, EU leaders have pushed “digital sovereignty” in recent years and called for reducing the continent’s reliance on American technology. This has made America companies offering Cloud solutions to change track and offer ‘sovereign Cloud’ in Europe. Amazon’s American rivals including Google and Microsoft also offer customers the option of storing data in Europe.Amazon’s cloud computing division recently said that it would expand its “sovereign cloud” across the European Union, hoping to cash in as EU governments seek to safeguard their citizens’ data. In a statement, the company announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would expand its physical “footprint” into Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal; adding to a site in eastern Germany. “The expansion would “provide organisations with further options to deploy workloads in the cloud with the highest level of sovereignty and operational independence”, AWS said. “By building a cloud that is European in its infrastructure, operations, and governance, we’re empowering organisations to innovate with confidence while maintaining complete control over their digital assets,” said Stephane Israel, AWS’s head of European Sovereign Cloud.

What worries Europe about American technology companies

Spooked by a lack of European tech champions to compete with US giants, EU leaders have been pushing for “digital sovereignty” in recent years and called for reducing the continent’s reliance on American technology. The worries have only grown as US President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a more confrontation tone with EU leaders. Last month, US cancelled visa of seven prominent European leaders. Recently a report in The Register said that Europe’s biggest aerospace company Airbus reportedly wants to move away from two of the biggest American technology companies — Google and Microsoft. According to the report, Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud.

Why analysts say ‘sovereign Cloud’ does not solve Europe’s problem

While American technology giants have been investing in ‘sovereign Cloud’ to quell fears od European companies, these soloutions are really not much of help as per European analysts. Harald Wehnes, a professor of computer science at the University of Wuerzburg, told AFP he thought AWS’s announcement was an example of “sovereignty washing”. “The American CLOUD Act means Europeans’ sensitive data can end up with the US administration as soon as it is with American cloud companies, even if it is stored on European servers,” he said. “If I have a European cloud provider, like IONOS, Hetzner or Noris Network, that doesn’t apply.”