EC Awards €180 Million for Sovereign Cloud

The European Commission awarded four companies up to €180 million. The funds will be awarded to them over six years to strengthen digital sovereignty through cloud services.

The EC awarded the funds to Luxembourg’s Post Telecom, Germany’s StackIT, French operator Iliad’s data centre unit Scaleway, and Belgium’s Proximus. “The tender supports the commission’s broader efforts to enhance its own sovereignty, reinforcing strategic control across key technologies and infrastructure,” the EC stated.

Post Telecom will work with partners CleverCloud and OVHcloud, while Proximus is teaming up with Thales and Google Cloud joint venture S3NS, Clarence, and French AI trailblazer Mistral. EC explained that providers have been selected based on alignment with the Cloud Sovereignty Framework, measuring sovereignty across eight objectives, including supply chain transparency, security, and technological openness.

EC awarded the four contracts in parallel to ensure diversification and resilience, avoiding over-reliance on a single provider. Large-scale use of the EU cloud is a prerequisite for improving the EU’s digital sovereignty, emphasised the EC, while it added that the tender encourages the whole sector to comply with European standards.

“The award enables EU institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies to procure sovereign cloud services. Scaling the use of EU cloud is key to strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty,” EC’s EVP of Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen, said on X.