Forum Europe’s third annual European Sovereign Cloud Policy and Industry Day took place in Brussels on June 3, 2025, gathering representatives from cloud vendors, service providers, and industry experts, as well as members of the European Parliament. Keynote speeches and panel discussions cast some light on the new sovereignty challenges that cloud providers and buyers in Europe are facing, which we can summarize around three major themes: 1) an unavoidable need to focus on AI sovereignty; 2) an urgent call for standardization; and 3) a shift in perspective from data protection to resilience.

Here are our key takeaways from these discussions:

  • Sovereign AI calls for a new supporting ecosystem in Europe. While AI usage is becoming ubiquitous across industries all over Europe, recent geopolitical tensions are raising some urgent questions. Sovereign AI means that organizations can adopt large language models (LLMs) that nobody can take away from them, that they can feed these LLMs with data that should not leave the country when this is a requirement, and that the data can be hosted on cloud infrastructure that does not suffer from any dependability on foreign governments’ decisions. European operators will have to offer a viable sovereign alternative to those of dominant US or Chinese vendors if they want to provide an appropriate ecosystem for sovereign AI in Europe.
  • Cloud vendors and users need standards to sustain sovereign deployments. Fragmentation of the cloud is one of the key challenges that vendors are facing in Europe today. As Dave Michels, researcher at the Queen Mary University of London, pointed out, “The argument that we cannot beat the hyperscalers is not helping. We need interoperability and standards.” On top of that, Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Dynamo, affirmed that “Data is the fuel, and we need to build the pipe: This is the concept behind EuroStack.” On this point, the discussions also highlighted how far the European cloud ecosystem is from offering a true sovereign alternative to the global vendors.
  • The sovereignty discussion moves from data protection to business resilience. In times of mounting geopolitical pressures, data protection is a comparatively smaller problem for businesses. Overreliance and overdependability on US hyperscalers is now concerning European organizations. In this context, a stronger focus on digital and cloud sovereignty allows organizations to be more resilient and avoid dependability on foreign governments’ influences. The European Sovereign Cloud Day has clearly outlined how the digital sovereignty discussion has passed the data protection layer and now drives European organizations’ fundamental choices regarding their cloud infrastructure and vendor ecosystem.

Reach out to Forrester to schedule an inquiry or guidance session to help guide your sovereign cloud and sovereign AI initiatives or to dig into the broader concept of digital sovereignty as it relates to European dependency on big tech.