AWS’s Sovereign Cloud for Europe Is Officially Here

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially opened its European Sovereign Cloud, an isolated cloud environment designed specifically to meet European digital sovereignty and data residency requirements.

Though AWS is an American company, the sovereign cloud is physically and legally independent from its other global regions, including its headquarters in the U.S. It’s also not the company’s first rodeo — AWS already operates AWS GovCloud and AWS China, both of which rely on similarly isolated environments.

The European Sovereign Cloud comes in response to consistent feedback from EU businesses. U.S. privacy laws are far looser than Europe’s standards and it doesn’t want the entirety of its infrastructure resting in foreign hands. As a result, EU officials and companies have been pushing for options that don’t let something like Microsoft v. The United States occur again.

The issue is that there aren’t many hyperscaler options that are perfectly comparable to AWS and its fellow stateside competitors, so many European organizations have no choice but to use the only ones that exist. And thus was born the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Although AWS guarantees its sovereign arm is completely operated and located in the EU, AWS is still an American company. And if U.S. authorities pushed for access to data inside the European Sovereign Cloud, AWS could face a Microsoft-shaped issue.

In 2013, the U.S. government demanded data from a Microsoft-hosted email account stored in Ireland. Microsoft resisted, arguing that U.S. warrants shouldn’t reach data belonging to a foreign citizen simply because an American company hosted it. This ended up in a five-year legal battle until Congress passed the CLOUD Act in 2019, which basically rendered the original case moot.

But AWS says it’s prepared if U.S. authorities want to step in. According to a white paper, AWS says it evaluates every law enforcement request on a case-by-case basis. That means there are a few ways a U.S. warrant could play out:

• If the government asks for data stored in the European Sovereign Cloud, AWS will first try to push that request directly to the customer and notify them as soon as possible about the request
• If AWS is legally barred from alerting the customer, it will try to get that restriction lifted so it can share as much information as allowed
• If a request conflicts with EU or local member-state law, AWS says it will challenge it to the fullest legal degree

Let’s take a closer look at what the European Sovereign Cloud actually entails:

• Customer data and customer-created metadata stay within the EU
• Run by EU-resident staff, under EU legal entities, with infrastructure and control planes governed by European law
• Meets standard compliance frameworks like ISO and SOC and relies on AWS’s Nitro security architecture

The difference appears to be in the actual structure. Unlike AWS’s existing European regions, the sovereign cloud is a separate partition altogether, with its own identity systems, billing, and operational controls.

It’s why AWS’s European Sovereign Cloud appears to be the most compliant and sophisticated compared to its competitors.

Sovereign cloud comparisons: AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud’s first region launched in Brandenburg, Germany, with future plans for Belgium, Netherlands, and Portugal.