25 CEOs of European cloud and digital service providers have sent an open letter to the European Commission.
In it, companies organized in the industry association CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe) are calling for five specific principles to be included in the planned Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) – the first EU law specifically targeting cloud services and artificial intelligence.
The letter, dated March 17, 2026, is addressed to Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy at the European Commission. She is primarily responsible for CADA and had scheduled a roundtable discussion with the industry. Virkkunen herself had already announced the draft law on improving cloud services and energy efficiency.
Five Principles Against Pseudo-Dominance
In essence, the signatories criticize the fact that American hyperscaling companies such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate the European market with around 70% market share – and promote themselves as “dominants” without ceding real control to European customers.
CISPE calls this practice “sovereignty laundering”: US companies advertise EU data centers and cybersecurity certificates, but are still subject to the US CLOUD Act, which allows US authorities to access data stored worldwide. In 2025, Microsoft admitted during a hearing before the French Senate that cannot guarantee data privacy for its European customers.
The five required principles include, first, a definition of sovereignty based on effective control rather than mere presence in the EU. Second, where full sovereignty is not possible, resilience should be ensured through customer-controlled encryption, data portability and technical reversibility – such as protection from extraterritorial access, for example, by the US CLOUD Act.
Third, the signatories demand reserved procurement shares for European providers in accordance with the principle “Buy European – Ensure Resilience – or Explain”.
Fourth, competition and interoperability should be strengthened, anti-competitive bundling of AI and cloud services should be prevented, and the importance of open source software should be recognized.
Fifth, tax-funded investments in cloud and AI infrastructure should primarily benefit the European ecosystem.
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