Today, in Potsdam near Berlin, the official opening of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will take place – a new, independent cloud intended for Europe and located within the European Union. The ceremony, which will be attended by the company's president, Matt Garman, is a response to the growing aspirations of EU regulators regarding European digital sovereignty.
The infrastructure has to fulfill the obligation digital sovereignty of European customers, especially public sector organizations and those operating in highly regulated industries.
Cloud ready for the worst?
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AWS wants to gain the trust of European customers by being fully separated from the giant's other infrastructure. Therefore, it created a separate, European management structure, with a new parent company and three of its daughter companies registered in Germany and run by EU citizens. The cloud will only be operated by employees resident in the EU and subject to European law, and no non-EU employee will have access to customer data.
Moreover, it ensures that users will not be deprived of their data even in the face of unexpected events and potential international tensions. What can be read between the lines is that the cloud will work, even in the face of possible pressure from the American authorities on technology companies. This could include, for example, a situation in which the US administration would prohibit American companies from operating in Europe.
AWS wants to convince European institutions to use its sovereign cloud
Source codes stay in Europe
“Its design is intended to enable operations to continue even in the event of disruption to communications with the rest of the world. To ensure continuity even in extreme circumstancesauthorized AWS European Sovereign Cloud employees who are EU residents will have independent access to a replica of the source code needed to maintain AWS European Sovereign Cloud services” – describes AWS in its announcement.
AWS will also offer an alternative for customers requiring even greater control – from Outposts (fully managed infrastructure deployed on-premises) to AI Factories (dedicated AI infrastructure in customer data centers) to Dedicated Local Zones (infrastructure exclusively for one customer in a selected location).
AWS European Sovereign Cloud will initially offer over 90 services across categories, including artificial intelligence, compute, containers, databases, networking, security, and data storage.
AWS is betting on Germany, just like Google
Spending on the sovereign cloud in Germany is expected to amount to approximately EUR 7.8 billion by 2040. Its inauguration is another act of fierce competition between American technology giants for the European market of artificial intelligence and sensitive data processing.
Google also recently announced an investment in infrastructure among our western neighbors. However, he focused on Munich – this is where he opened his first sovereign cloud hub in Europe, and is also creating a new data center. Together with the expansion of offices, also in other cities, the value of this investment is approximately PLN 5.5 billion.
AWS emphasizes that the first data center is in Germany, but this architecture is to be the beginning of a broader expansion on the continent. To meet requirements for isolation, in-country data residency and low latency, it will create new sovereign local zones (AWS Local Zones) in Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal.
Similar investment in Poland? There is no topic
Poland is not yet in the sphere of interest of the next zone. At least officially. — We do not openly discuss plans or schedules for future regions – Tomasz Olejnik, General Director of the AWS Public Sector for the Central and Eastern Europe region, emphasized to BI, assuring that Amazon “is keen to listen to customers' opinions to understand the reasons why they would like additional regions of the sovereign cloud.”
Read also: Google is investing billions in AI in Germany. I asked about Poland, and the president mentioned three conditions
However, he argues that investing in Germany is good news for Polish companies. “It provides customers with additional choice in moving their most sensitive and critical workloads to the cloud while offering the same security, availability and performance as existing AWS regions,” he says.
However, AWS emphasizes that it has so far invested EUR 225 billion in the EU, employing over 150,000. employees. AWS's infrastructure network on the continent spans nine regions and has a presence in over 20 countries.
Grzegorz Kowalczyk, journalist of Business Insider Polska
