AWS European Sovereign Cloud gets €7.8 billion injection

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud was first announced in October last year, and is described as a ‘new independent cloud for Europe’, with infrastructure located within the EU and operated independently from other regions, meaning data technically stays in the EU.

It will have the same architecture, service portfolio, and APIs as the rest of the AWS cloud platform, but is designed to meet the data sovereignty needs some public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries have.

The first AWS Region will launch in Brandenburg, Germany, by the end of 2025. AWS says the investment is estimated to contribute €17.2 billion to Germany’s total GDP through 2040, and support around 2,800 jobs in local German businesses each year in areas such as construction, facility maintenance, engineering, and telecommunications.

The cloud giant will also create new roles to operate the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, including software engineers, systems developers, and solutions architects. AWS says this is part of a commitment that all day-to-day operations are controlled exclusively by personnel located in the EU, including access to data centres, technical support, and customer service.

“This investment reinforces our commitment to offer customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available in the cloud,” said Max Peterson, Vice President of Sovereign Cloud at AWS. “We're investing heavily in new local talent and infrastructure, which will help provide the operational sovereignty our customers require. This is an exciting milestone, and we're looking forward to the ways that our customers and partners across Europe will drive further innovation with the AWS European Sovereign Cloud."

Prof. Dr. Jörg Steinbach, Brandenburg’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Labour and Energy added: “High performing, reliable, and secure infrastructure is the most important prerequisite for an increasingly digitalised economy and society. Brandenburg is making progress here. In recent years, we have set on a course to invest in modern and sustainable data centre infrastructure in our state, strengthening Brandenburg as a business location. State-of-the-art data centres for secure cloud computing are the basis for a strong digital economy. I am pleased Amazon Web Services (AWS) has chosen Brandenburg for a long-term investment in its cloud computing infrastructure for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.”

Earlier this month, figures from Synergy Research showed that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services during the first three months of the year surged by 21% on last year to top $76 billion. AWS, Microsoft, and Google took the lion's share of the market in Q1, accounting for 72% of spending on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).