Big Tech Warns Europe: Ditching US Cloud Will Cost You €115B (Study Funded by Big Tech)
America's largest cloud providers have a message for European policymakers: reduce your dependence on US technology, and you'll pay dearly for it. Specifically, €115 billion over the next decade, according to a new study. One small detail worth knowing before you take that number seriously — the study was commissioned by CCIA Europe, a lobbying group whose membership reads like a Silicon Valley roll call. Amazon, Google, Meta. Companies with an obvious financial interest in Brussels continuing to buy American.
The research itself was carried out by the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), and it targets the European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, known as CADA. The Commission put the cost of CADA's sovereignty requirements at somewhere up to €18 billion. CCIA's hired researchers put it at €115 billion — more than six times higher. The report breaks this down as €33.3 billion in direct public-sector costs, with a further €80 billion potentially hitting private companies in banking, healthcare, energy, and transport.
That €80 billion figure deserves some scrutiny. It's not based on anything Brussels has actually legislated. It assumes the Commission decides to extend sovereignty requirements to cover 25 percent of cloud workloads across critical private-sector industries. That's a modelled worst-case projection dressed up as a warning. Handy.
The report takes particular aim at Article 31 of the proposed legislation, which CCIA claims could give the Commission authority to push sovereignty requirements into essential private-sector services. A significant chunk of the projected costs, around 69 percent by their estimate, comes from code rewriting and software re-architecting when businesses are forced to switch providers.
On a per-worker basis, Luxembourg supposedly takes the hardest hit at €1,711 over ten years, followed by Denmark, Austria, Finland, and Ireland. Ireland's inclusion on the pain list is quietly amusing given that it hosts the European HQs of several US tech firms, including some CCIA members.
CCIA is calling on EU governments to narrow sovereignty restrictions to genuinely sensitive workloads and drop any requirements tied to corporate nationality or staff citizenship in favour of technical, risk-based criteria. Which sounds reasonable until you notice it's essentially asking regulators to keep market conditions roughly as they are.
Amazon and Google, both named CCIA members, have each spent years selling European cloud services while simultaneously developing their own sovereign cloud products — AWS European Sovereign Cloud and Google's various sovereign offerings respectively. So they're already selling Europeans sovereignty as a premium product. Meanwhile their industry association is warning governments not to mandate too much of it. The circularity there is impressive.
Neither Amazon nor Google responded when asked about the conflict of interest.
Whether CADA would genuinely cost anywhere near €115 billion is impossible to say from a study funded by the companies most threatened by it. What's straightforward is that the loudest voices warning Europe about the dangers of technological independence are the same ones who profit most from Europe's continued dependence. Funny how that works.