Smals, the joint IT organization serving more than 300 Belgian public institutions including social security and healthcare bodies, has selected Google Cloud as its primary cloud provider. The framework agreement opens Google Cloud services and AI technologies to Smals members, while Smals keeps operational control over how those environments get used.
What makes this arrangement worth understanding is where Google Cloud sits relative to what Smals already runs. The organization operates its own on-premise systems, participates in Belgium’s governmental community cloud, and maintains a private cloud environment across three data center facilities in the Brussels region. Google Cloud becomes a third option alongside those existing pillars, not a replacement for any of them.
Dirk Deridder, Smals’ CTO, described the arrangement as giving member institutions additional technical options for workloads with specific requirements, while staying within established security and sovereignty mandates that govern Belgian public sector infrastructure. That framing matters because public sector cloud adoption in Europe has increasingly turned on exactly this kind of layered approach, where sovereignty concerns do not block hyperscaler access but do shape how organizations structure it.
Kurt Rommens, who heads Google Cloud’s public sector work in the Benelux region, positioned the partnership around supporting both Smals’ own AI plans and those of its member institutions, with an emphasis on meeting portability and sovereignty standards that Belgian federal authorities set.
Substantial Google investment in Belgian infrastructure backs the agreement. The company pledged €5 billion toward cloud and AI infrastructure in Belgium over two years, an announcement it made in October 2025. That builds on a history stretching back to 2009, when Google established its europe-west1 region in the country, and includes an expanding Saint-Ghislain campus that now houses five data centers across 90 hectares, plus a newer campus under construction in Farciennes.
For an organization managing infrastructure across social security, healthcare, and broader public administration, adding a major cloud provider while preserving existing systems reflects a measured approach rather than a wholesale migration. Smals gains more options. Member institutions choose which workloads go where, based on what each actually requires.
