Cloud computing’s cold war: EU vs US and China

European officials have long eyed the rise of the big US cloud companies with suspicion and envy. Among their concerns is the European Union’s reliance on non-European providers of cloud computing and a need for ”data sovereignty,” or giving Europeans control over the way their data is stored and processed. Germany and France now have a new plan to create government-backed cloud computing infrastructure for EU organizations.

Dubbed Gaia-X, the initiative is billed as “open infrastructure" — although it doesn’t appear to be about building any physical infrastructure; rather, it's a framework for interoperability between different cloud providers and a requirement for transparency over the way they store data. As the new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has said, “It may be too late to replicate hyperscalers, but it is not too late to achieve technological sovereignty” in key areas. However, low-cost cloud computing relies on physical scale.