US tech giants warn Europe that ditching US tech giants could cost €115B

Some of America's biggest tech companies have a warning for Europe: curb your reliance on US cloud providers, and it could cost you €115 billion.

That's the finding of a new study commissioned by CCIA Europe, a lobbying group whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, companies that have plenty of reasons to want European governments to keep buying American cloud services.

The research, conducted by the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), claims the European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) could saddle Europe with €115 billion in costs over the next decade, more than six times the Commission's upper estimate of €18 billion.

The report argues that restrictions favoring European cloud providers would leave governments and businesses facing hefty bills to migrate workloads and rewrite software.

It puts direct public-sector costs at €33.3 billion, with a further €80 billion potentially falling on private companies in sectors including banking, healthcare, energy, and transport.

However, a rather large asterisk is attached to that €80 billion figure.

It assumes the Commission extends sovereignty requirements beyond public procurement to cover 25 percent of cloud workloads in essential private-sector industries.

In other words, it's a modeled scenario, not a bill Brussels has already handed European businesses.

The study also comes with some baggage of its own.

CCIA represents several US technology giants that dominate the European cloud market, including Amazon and Google.

Both have spent years selling European customers cloud services while more recently developing sovereign cloud offerings designed to address concerns about foreign ownership, data access, and regulatory control.

Amazon, for example, has been developing its AWS European Sovereign Cloud, while Google markets a range of sovereign cloud solutions.

Apparently, sovereignty is an attractive proposition when it comes with a hyperscaler logo attached.

Meta, another CCIA member, has its own interests in European AI infrastructure, although it is not a commercial cloud provider on the scale of AWS or Google Cloud.