Back in July 2019, the German economy minister Peter Altmaier let slip that Germany "has a claim to digital sovereignty" and needs a European cloud industry of its own to rival US corporations such as Amazon. Why not?
Germany floated a European cloud — Gaia-X — to rival AWS, Azure and GCP, raising questions of digital sovereignty given how much sensitive data sits on a handful of US-owned platforms. Expect the same "unfair state aid" accusations once levelled at Airbus. But the Airbus analogy cuts the other way too: real competition pushes everyone to innovate. For the consumer, there's no such thing as bad competition.
So it sounds like Germany might be leading the EU towards creating a European rival to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This rival would be called Gaia-X. Should the proposal gain traction, expect lots of spluttering and astro-turfing about Europe trying to “balkanise the web”, the end of the internet as we know it, and the loss of “free speech” and “digital rights” — unfortunately everything is political these days.
The reach of cloud platforms like Amazon AWS is staggering. Almost any SaaS service consumed in our company resides on AWS or Azure. It is ultimately on those servers that much of our company’s deepest secrets reside. While we have a policy of ensuring the appropriate availability zone is used (e.g. Europe/West for our internal information on AWS), the fact remains that a couple of companies have potentially unprecedented access to our data. That should pose a problem for many European organisations, given the history of snooping and recent successful hacking attempts.
There is also the issue of competition. If Gaia-X comes into existence, it will be compared to Airbus. As Airbus began to seriously compete with Boeing in the eighties, accusations of unfair competition over illegal state assistance were levelled by Boeing. Make no mistake, the same accusations will be levelled at Gaia-X. As with Airbus, it will probably be the case that Gaia-X accepts plenty of startup funding in the form of soft loans and grants. But when it comes to pork, there is always a lot to go around — both AWS and Boeing are fed plenty by federal and state governments in the US.
If Airbus had never come into existence, Boeing would not produce the incredible products it does today — and vice versa. They need each other to ratchet up their ambitions.
So let’s put aside the hypocritical claims and counter-claims about non-level playing fields, and focus on the effect of another large cloud player entering the market. A Euro-centric Gaia-X competing on the world stage would prompt AWS and Azure to innovate even further. For the consumer, there is no such thing as bad competition — and while another cloud platform might create some fragmentation among developers, is that such a terrible thing? Sometimes I look at AWS and wonder what is different from when IBM or Digital or Microsoft seemed to dominate everyone’s thinking.
Personally, I’m anxious to see what, if anything, emerges. Diversity is good.
Digital sovereignty, data control and avoiding lock-in are live concerns for energy organisations handling sensitive operational data — the same instinct that makes open-source, sovereign AI models so appealing. We help clients build on infrastructure and software they can actually control. Let’s talk.
We help energy organisations build on infrastructure and software they can actually control — avoiding lock-in with sensitive operational data. Let's talk.