13 European cloud providers back EU push to reduce reliance on US tech

Thirteen European cloud providers joined forces with a group of EU lawmakers and NGOs on Monday to back the European Commission's drive to cut the region's dependence on US technologies and support local businesses.

The Commission is set to announce measures on Wednesday aimed at ensuring European companies, rather than US rivals, provide cloud streaming services for sensitive public tenders, while also boosting the production of made-in-Europe chips.

The push is driven partly by tensions with the United States and China, as well as by a broader effort to catch up with both rivals in key technologies.

"Technological sovereignty means that Europe has the capacity to freely design, understand, choose from different home-grown sources, build, operate, and effectively regulate the digital systems on which its society and economy rely," the groups said in a joint open letter seen by Reuters.

Signatories include French cloud vendor OVHcloud (OVH), Germany's Nextcloud, social networks Mastodon and Monnett Social, Swiss privacy software company Proton, browser company Ecosia, and Dutch quantum chip maker QuantWare.

In April, Cybernews reported that France's OVHcloud is creating a dedicated defense vertical after several European defense ministries approached it to support their military digital transformation.

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The European Commission has also been in advanced negotiations with OVH to transition its cloud services away from Microsoft since at least June last year.

Germany’s Nextcloud is also playing one of the key roles in Europe’s new push for digital sovereignty. It’s often presented as a local alternative to EU homegrown tools offered by tech giants such as Microsoft and Google. Nextcloud is now one of the leading companies in the development of Euro-Office, a new collaborative document-editing solution developed by European companies.

Germany’s open-source Mastodon is presented as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X. After Musk acquired Twitter, users left the platform en masse, and Mastodon became one of the most popular alternatives.

Lawmakers from the Greens group at the European Parliament and six civil groups, including Defend Democracy and Save Social, also signed the letter.

"Our message is simple: Build European, buy European, protect European," said lawmaker Alexandra Geese.

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