In a significant move to bolster its presence in Europe, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a substantial investment of €7.8 billion into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud project, extending through 2040. This initiative, unveiled last October, aims to establish an autonomous cloud infrastructure within the European Union (EU), operated independently to ensure data sovereignty for European customers.
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will replicate the architecture, services, and APIs of the broader AWS platform but will cater specifically to the data sovereignty needs of public sector entities and heavily regulated industries across Europe.
The inaugural AWS Region under this project is scheduled to launch in Brandenburg, Germany, by the close of 2025. AWS projects that this investment will contribute approximately €17.2 billion to Germany’s GDP over the next two decades, creating employment opportunities for about 2,800 individuals annually across various sectors such as construction, engineering, and telecommunications.
To facilitate the operational autonomy and compliance requirements of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, AWS will recruit and train local talent, including software engineers, systems developers, and solutions architects. This commitment ensures that day-to-day operations, from data center management to customer service, remain under EU control.
Max Peterson, Vice President of Sovereign Cloud at AWS, emphasized, “This investment reinforces our commitment to offer customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available in the cloud.”
Brandenburg’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Labour and Energy, Prof. Dr. Jörg Steinbach, lauded the development as crucial for advancing the region’s digital economy. “State-of-the-art data centres for secure cloud computing are the basis for a strong digital economy,” he stated, highlighting the strategic importance of modern and sustainable infrastructure.
This announcement by AWS comes amid a broader surge in enterprise cloud spending, with figures from Synergy Research indicating a 21% year-on-year increase in cloud infrastructure services during the first quarter of the year. AWS, alongside Microsoft and Google, continues to dominate the market for infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings, collectively capturing 72% of the sector’s spending.
