The European Commission is stepping up efforts to strengthen the EU's digital sovereignty by launching a tender for cloud services worth up to €180 million over six years. The initiative gives EU institutions and bodies access to cloud services provided by a group of providers based in Europe.
EU cloud competition
Four suppliers were selected in the competition. The four awarded providers are European companies: Post Telecom with its partners CleverCloud and OVHcloud, STACKIT, Scaleway, and finally Proximus, which collaborates with S3NS (a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud), Clarence and Mistral.
The competition was launched in October 2025 as a competition under the Commission's Cloud III Dynamic Purchasing System.
“The providers I selected were chosen based on their alignment with the Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework, which measures sovereignty across eight objectives. These include strategic, legal, operational and environmental parameters, as well as supply chain transparency, technological openness, security and compliance with EU laws,” they mention the officials.
With these four contracts, the Commission aims to ensure diversification and resilience, while avoiding excessive reliance on a single provider. To qualify, providers had to demonstrate that third parties outside the EU have limited influence on the technologies and services involved.
“The competition encourages the entire sector to comply with European standards and values,” the Commission says.
Next steps include updating the Cloud Sovereignty Framework with more detailed assessment criteria and applying these standards to digital services.
The Commission is also preparing a Tech Sovereignty package that will include an Open Source strategy, the Chips Act 2, a roadmap for digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence in energy, and the Cloud and Artificial Intelligence Development Act, which will set out how sovereignty for cloud and Artificial Intelligence services will be implemented within the single market.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
