A Belgian-Led Consortium Wins Part of the EU's 180 Million Euro Bet Against US Cloud Reliance
Proximus heads one of four groups chosen for Brussels' sovereign cloud program, as the EU's digital chief pushes American tech giants from promises toward enforceable guarantees that no government can pull a kill switch on European data.
A European consortium led by the Belgian telecom operator Proximus has won one of four contracts worth up to 180 million euros combined under the European Commission's sovereign cloud procurement program, part of a broader push by Brussels to reduce the bloc's dependence on American cloud providers. The Proximus-led group relies on technology from S3NS, a French company controlled by Thales that runs Google Cloud infrastructure under French legal control.
The contract, awarded in April, sits inside a wider Cloud Sovereignty Framework the Commission introduced to score providers against 48 criteria covering legal control, data handling, operations and supply chains. Henna Virkkunen, the Commission's executive vice president overseeing tech sovereignty, has said scaling the use of EU cloud is key to strengthening the bloc's digital independence, and has proposed a Cloud and AI Development Act that would extend similar sovereignty assessments across public sector cloud services more broadly.
Brussels wants guarantees, not pledges
Virkkunen has been blunt about what is driving the push: a demand for certainty that no foreign government can effectively switch off access to the technology European institutions and companies rely on. We want to be sure nobody has a kill switch, she said earlier this year. She has also acknowledged that the highest sovereignty tiers in the Commission's framework will be difficult for American providers to reach, since US law can require them to comply with government orders in ways that conflict with full European control.
Microsoft has already tried to address that concern directly, pledging in 2025 to challenge in court any government order suspending its European cloud operations and making that commitment legally binding in its contracts with European governments and the Commission, with backup code held in Switzerland as a fallback if a legal challenge fails. Whether pledges like that satisfy Brussels' new framework, or whether only Europe based alternatives such as the Proximus-led group will qualify for the most sensitive government contracts, is likely to shape how much of the EU's cloud spending American firms can still compete for in the years ahead.
