How effective would this setup be if the parent company in the US is ordered to order the EU subsidiary to do something not in the interests of the EU?
If it breaks the law in the EU, then the European employees staffing the data center refuse, because they don't want to go to jail or pay fines.
That's the entire point of setting it up like this.
Think of it like fast-food franchises. They have to sell the same food and use the same branding and charge the same prices. But if McDonald's tells you to start selling cocaine on the side, you tell them nope, that's not in the contract and I don't feel like going to prison.
> The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is the only fully-featured, independently operated sovereign cloud, backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances and legal protections.
independently OPERATED, not independently owned
therefore: still under the jurisdiction of the US regime
Sovereign-by-design but still runs a software stack that is largely written and maintained by a US staff...
All of these isolation sovereignty iniatives are window dressing to the bigger problem that the EU and other countries are massively dependent on proprietaey US-centric software stacks.
If push comes to shove, these services can and will be weaponized against EU interests. They are bugged and backdoored to the brim. If we see a risk in chinese-made electrical buses which can potentially be remotely shut down by an integrated sim card, then using AWS should be a no go in the current political climate - no matter how much lipstick they put on that pig.
Last week, after receiving a fine in Italy, the Cloudflare CEO demonstrated that US tech leadership are extremely emotionally volatile and can lash out in all directions, threatening unrelated parties with shutdown of service. This is in line with Peter "anti christ" Thiel and Elon "nazi salute" Musk going off the rails. Maybe it is a drug-induced psychosis from their annual gathering in the desert where US tech workers consume illegal substances, I don't know.
What if someone scratches Bezos' yacht by accident and then he threatens to shut down the DC? Or he might get upset about a CO2 surcharge when refueling his private jet? Can we really take these risks?
Microsoft admitted that it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty [0] "on June 18 before a [French] Senate inquiry into public procurement and the role it plays in European digital sovereignty" as the CLOUD Act "gives the US government authority to obtain digital data held by US-based tech corporations irrespective of whether that data is stored on servers at home or on foreign soil."
It'd be great if they could clarify in their FAQ [1] if and how the CLOUD Act affects them.
Yeah.... no thx. Hard voice against it and anything that comes from the US. There is tons of stuff that is genuinely cool, we got tons of stuff it would be barbaric to spit in the soup.
However I'm pretty sure at this point that even the GAFAM are tired of this situation and that they don't care if giants their size show up in Europe. I'm genuinely thinking that what is also happening with AI (eg : free knowledge drop) is some kind of mechanism to allow those new giants to emerge in other places than US.
Being the bright star that takes all the broken stuff on the head is not always the smartest move - at some point if you are blocking everything from showing up just because you exist, you are just slowly creating conflict against you - which i'm pretty sure the GAFAM are not interested in.
I'm pretty sure there is a lot of power dynamic shift happening just now, AI bubble is just a tool that permit it -- the amount of startups that are allowed to launch on the simplest product are crazy --
tldr : creating incumbents then beating them is a display of power ; not caring is a display of power, having too much money is a display of power, being blocked due to political and social movement is weakening the velocity of these entities - i'm pretty sure atp that creating new giants in Europe would help them more than to continue in what appears like a colonialist endeavor - which they probably don't like either (they just want to market and win)
I worked on a team deploying a service to European Sovereign Cloud (ESC). Disclaimer - I am a low level SDE and all opinions are my own.
AWS has set up proper boundaries between ESC and global AWS. Since I'm based out of the US I can't see anything going on in ECS even in the service we develop. To fix an issue there we have to play telephone with an engineer in ESC where they give us a summary of the issue or debug it on their own. All data is really 100% staying within ESC.
My guess is that ESC will be less reliable than other regions, at least for about a year. The isolation really slows down debugging issues. Problems that would be fixed in a day or two can take a month. The engineers in ESC don't have the same level of knowledge about systems as the teams owning them. The teething issues will eventually resolve, but new features will be delayed within the region.
I was actually surprised to see this:
"As we make this change, we will continue to work as a blended team of EU residents and EU citizens, with all personnel working from EU locations, before gradually completing our transition to EU citizen operations for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud." This looks like a more serious attempt to make it independent of US meddling. It will not protect it fully, but still.
The prices for the only region in Germany are very similar to the prices in eu-west-1 (Frankfurt), except in € instead of $, so that’s basically a 16% markup by today's exchange rate. Also, AMD CPUs appear to be completely missing.
I would love to see a US specific version of this as well. Something similar to GovCloud with the same security controls and employee vetting but accessible to commercial customers.
In other news, wolves have set up a vegan restaurant for sheep. The chefs have been specially instructed not to eat their guests, the grass is 100% organic. Mint sauce is kept well out of sight. The heavy duty locks on the doors will definitely not be used and the red stains are from beetroot. Definitely beetroot.
Seriously though, what is stopping Europeans to "just build their own"? EU could provide some form of financing - cheap loans, tax breaks, favourable regulation etc. I know AWS is a million things, not just VMs, but is building a small cloud provider and scaling from there really that hard? Maybe I'm being super naive - ELI5 please?
There are some EU cloud providers that try (OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner, Upcloud, Evroc), but AWS is a product 20+ years in the making and only in the last 5 that people are really opening their eyes to the sovereignty problem. And even if those providers did have the money and regulation breaks AWS had, today is a much different market than the one AWS grew up with, in which there wasn’t an incumbent and they were leading the market. Nowadays everyone has to be at least similar to AWS for people to consider it, and I feel sovereignty alone is not enough.
In other words: making a cloud provider isn’t that difficult, making a cloud provider that people will use INSTEAD OF AWS is an exponentially harder problem.
The rule of law no longer exists in the US. The regime is bragging that an officer who killed a woman on camera won’t even be investigated. And even if there were an investigation or even a criminal conviction, it would just be voided using the executive pardon power. Everyone committing federal crimes on behalf of the regime has de facto absolute immunity for this reason.
This move had a chance to work a couple of years ago, when European companies were seeking CYA compliance in regards to GDPR. The tone has now clearly shifted to a decoupling from American tech. My prediction is that American cloud providers will lag behind truly European alternatives this year.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadhttps://cybernews.com/news/europe-internet-control-sovereign...
That's the entire point of setting it up like this.
Think of it like fast-food franchises. They have to sell the same food and use the same branding and charge the same prices. But if McDonald's tells you to start selling cocaine on the side, you tell them nope, that's not in the contract and I don't feel like going to prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_Stat...
independently OPERATED, not independently owned
therefore: still under the jurisdiction of the US regime
All of these isolation sovereignty iniatives are window dressing to the bigger problem that the EU and other countries are massively dependent on proprietaey US-centric software stacks.
Last week, after receiving a fine in Italy, the Cloudflare CEO demonstrated that US tech leadership are extremely emotionally volatile and can lash out in all directions, threatening unrelated parties with shutdown of service. This is in line with Peter "anti christ" Thiel and Elon "nazi salute" Musk going off the rails. Maybe it is a drug-induced psychosis from their annual gathering in the desert where US tech workers consume illegal substances, I don't know.
What if someone scratches Bezos' yacht by accident and then he threatens to shut down the DC? Or he might get upset about a CO2 surcharge when refueling his private jet? Can we really take these risks?
AWS should be ditched altogether and something Europe based chosen even if it requires investment.
It'd be great if they could clarify in their FAQ [1] if and how the CLOUD Act affects them.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/microsoft_admits_it_c...
[1] https://aws.eu/faq/
However I'm pretty sure at this point that even the GAFAM are tired of this situation and that they don't care if giants their size show up in Europe. I'm genuinely thinking that what is also happening with AI (eg : free knowledge drop) is some kind of mechanism to allow those new giants to emerge in other places than US.
Being the bright star that takes all the broken stuff on the head is not always the smartest move - at some point if you are blocking everything from showing up just because you exist, you are just slowly creating conflict against you - which i'm pretty sure the GAFAM are not interested in.
I'm pretty sure there is a lot of power dynamic shift happening just now, AI bubble is just a tool that permit it -- the amount of startups that are allowed to launch on the simplest product are crazy --
tldr : creating incumbents then beating them is a display of power ; not caring is a display of power, having too much money is a display of power, being blocked due to political and social movement is weakening the velocity of these entities - i'm pretty sure atp that creating new giants in Europe would help them more than to continue in what appears like a colonialist endeavor - which they probably don't like either (they just want to market and win)
Idk I might be extrapolating like a mad man
AWS has set up proper boundaries between ESC and global AWS. Since I'm based out of the US I can't see anything going on in ECS even in the service we develop. To fix an issue there we have to play telephone with an engineer in ESC where they give us a summary of the issue or debug it on their own. All data is really 100% staying within ESC.
My guess is that ESC will be less reliable than other regions, at least for about a year. The isolation really slows down debugging issues. Problems that would be fixed in a day or two can take a month. The engineers in ESC don't have the same level of knowledge about systems as the teams owning them. The teething issues will eventually resolve, but new features will be delayed within the region.
The prices for the only region in Germany are very similar to the prices in eu-west-1 (Frankfurt), except in € instead of $, so that’s basically a 16% markup by today's exchange rate. Also, AMD CPUs appear to be completely missing.
Just stop using clouds run your own computers.
Seriously though, what is stopping Europeans to "just build their own"? EU could provide some form of financing - cheap loans, tax breaks, favourable regulation etc. I know AWS is a million things, not just VMs, but is building a small cloud provider and scaling from there really that hard? Maybe I'm being super naive - ELI5 please?
In other words: making a cloud provider isn’t that difficult, making a cloud provider that people will use INSTEAD OF AWS is an exponentially harder problem.
For a small/medium business in EU ESC is an overkill. Their data has no strategic value. Just use whatever infrastructure you want.
For any large company working at global level, owning cutting edge technology ESC is not a protection.
US just stolen a president of foreign country, do you really believe they would hesitate to do this with anybody else if they want?
Google Cloud also has the same product but with less "Google Cloud" branding:
S3NS |Thales x Google Cloud targeting a trusted cloud https://www.s3ns.io/en