A new study commissioned by CCIA Europe, a lobbying group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, claims that cutting reliance on US cloud providers could cost Europe about $133 billion over the next decade. The European Centre for International Political Economy carried out the research, which targets the Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act and says the true cost runs more than six times the Commission’s upper estimate of roughly $20.8 billion.
Under the report’s numbers, direct public-sector costs reach about $38.5 billion. A further $92.5 billion could fall on private firms in banking, healthcare, energy and transport. That second figure comes with a big caveat, though. It assumes the Commission stretches sovereignty rules beyond public procurement to cover 25 percent of cloud workloads in essential private industries. In other words, it models a scenario and does not describe a bill Brussels has already issued.
The study singles out Article 31, which it says could let the Commission widen sovereignty requirements into private-sector services. Code rewriting and re-architecting make up 69 percent of the estimated costs. Luxembourg would take the largest hit at about $1,978 per worker over ten years, ahead of Denmark at $1,046, Austria at $1,040, Finland at $999 and Ireland at $990.
Context matters here. CCIA speaks for several US companies that dominate the European cloud market, and Amazon and Google have both built sovereign cloud offerings to answer concerns about foreign ownership and data access. Keeping European customers on their platforms clearly serves their commercial interests, so readers should weigh the findings with that in mind.
CCIA urges EU governments to overhaul the proposal, limit sovereignty rules to sensitive workloads and drop requirements tied to corporate origin or staff nationality. Instead, it favors risk-based technical safeguards. Policy manager Mitchell Rutledge said Member States cannot rely on the Commission’s incomplete estimates, adding that the official assessment missed 70 percent of the act’s true impact.
Neither Amazon nor Google responded to The Register’s questions. Whether sovereignty will prove as costly as CCIA predicts remains unclear, yet the companies raising the alarm stand to gain if Europe keeps buying American.
