AWS European Sovereign Cloud is not about Sovereignty

Last week (January 15, 2026), AWS launched its European Sovereign Cloud, a physically separate infrastructure ("partition"), operated by EU residents, under a German legal entity. Analysts are already asking the right questions: Is it still a US-owned company? Does the CLOUD Act still apply?

I have a simpler question: who is this actually for?

The "Sovereign Cloud" pitch

Real EU-based cloud companies have played the "Sovereign Cloud" card for years. But sovereignty was the cherry on the cake, not the cake itself.

The hard truth is that European providers often lag behind AWS in features and reliability. In a previous company, our CTO would have loved to use Scaleway (FR) or Hetzner (DE). But he couldn't: first, our customers expected us to rely on a "serious" provider with good SLAs and uptime guarantees; second, we needed IAM, fine-grained policies, and S3 features the European alternatives simply didn't have at the time (and still don't).

Now, European customers increasingly face high regulatory compliance demands. Not only public sector organisations and regulated industries that need "sovereign" infrastructure, but also SMBs that want to sell to customers with compliance requirements, like the company I mentioned above. Like many other SMBs, AWS was a common "standard" or "default" choice for them. That phrase "Nobody gets fired for buying AWS" kind of applies well here.

Now, procurement requirements force them to consider migrating to smaller EU cloud providers that don't have the shiny stuff, and migration is painful. It's the classic "AWS Lock-in" problem that makes a migration hard and costly: Terraform/IaC is already written for AWS-specific services, the staff is trained on AWS paradigms and services, the architecture is built around AWS's feature set and "Well-Architected Framework".

I couldn't have imagined doing this migration back when I worked there. We were far too small a team for such a task.

AWS ESC is a compliance checkbox

AWS European Sovereign Cloud solves this. It keeps customers on AWS (same APIs, same tools, same Terraform) and lets companies claim "European sovereign cloud" in RFPs. It avoids the migration cost and pain with a near 1:1 migration experience. Everybody wins. Status quo maintained.

Of course it's still American. Technically AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a German company, but we all know it's ultimately under AWS USA control. I guess people don't care that much about the philosophical point.

I bet account managers and salespersons will sweeten the deal (free egress, migration credits, etc.) to prevent any defection to actual European competitors. Even if, from a pure technical standpoint, AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a direct competitor to the regular AWS (which of course has European regions).

The cynical truth

This isn't about real sovereignty. It's about giving European AWS customers a plausible story to tell their compliance departments, regulators, and customers without actually changing anything fundamental.

AWS European Sovereign Cloud is for locked-in AWS customers who need to tick a compliance box without migrating.

The real losers are actual European cloud providers trying to compete on genuine sovereignty, with made-in-EU products.

Closing thoughts

These days, my stack is simple enough to move anywhere in an afternoon. I used to love AWS's shiny gadgets. Now I'm convinced the only good AWS stack is the 100% EC2-based one: the kind you can actually migrate when sovereignty stops being just a checkbox ;)

Real sovereignty is a simple stack.