Cristina Caffara, an economist and antitrust expert, says the hyperscalers have responded to this movement by deploying an “army of lobbyists” in Brussels.

At the press conference, Caffara said the lobbyists are “relentlessly” targeting senior figures in Brussels to derail digital sovereignty efforts in Europe. The panellists even speculated that the EU-backed digital sovereignty initiative, Gaia-X, had been “infiltrated” by tech companies seeking to sabotage the movement by overloading it with bureaucracy.

The hyperscalers are not deaf to Europeans’ concerns. Google and Microsoft, for instance, recently issued public statements designed to allay any worries about US hostilities; providers are building strictly EU-regulated data centres across Europe; and, earlier this year, Google launched its ‘cloud data boundary’, which gives customers more control over where data is stored and processed, and a ‘user data shelf’ for validating the security of apps built via that data boundary.

However, Frank Karlitschek, the CEO of Nextcloud, which supplies customers including France’s interior ministry and Amnesty International with open-source, self-hosted collaboration software, describes such moves from the hyperscalers as “sovereignty-washing”.

“[The hyperscalers] say they have hosting centres in Europe, so it’s all fine. But the Cloud Act states that if you’re a US organisation, you follow the US law, which means you need to give US agencies access to this data,” Karlitschek said at the press conference.