The battle for European technological sovereignty continues. Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on Thursday the launch of its sovereign European cloud (AWS). European Sovereign CloudAWS has announced plans to expand its European sovereign cloud presence from Germany across the EU, a new independent cloud for Europe located within the European Union (EU) and physically and logically separate from other regions where AWS operates, with core infrastructure based in Germany. According to a company statement, this is "the only fully functional sovereign cloud, operated independently and supported by robust technical controls, sovereignty guarantees, and legal protections designed to meet the sensitive data needs of European governments and businesses." AWS also announced plans to expand its European sovereign cloud presence from Germany across the EU to support stringent requirements for isolation, in-country data residency, and low latency. This will begin with what they call new AWS Sovereign Local Zones (AWS Local Zones). Sovereign Local ZonesLocated in Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands, AWS Local Zones are a type of infrastructure that allows customers to store their data in a specific geographic location to meet data residency requirements or run latency-sensitive applications. The new zones announced this Thursday will be part of the European sovereign cloud, extending sovereignty controls from Germany to the entire EU. This will give customers with stricter data independence or residency requirements the option to use AWS. Dedicated Local Zones, AWS AI Factories either AWS Outposts in locations they select, including their own local data centers.

A few weeks ago, at an institutional event in Brussels, a digital policy expert celebrated that Europe's commitment to defense opened a window of opportunity for European artificial intelligence. But he warned: "We will need a lot more data than we have now." No one in the room seemed to have any problem. No one mentioned that one of the most important principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is precisely that of limiting data collection to what is strictly necessary.

Despite the recent pause in the trade war unleashed by the US, the question of what tariff retaliation the European Union could implement without setting itself too high a bar remains open. Overall, the EU exports slightly more to the US than it imports from the US (in 2023, a positive surplus of 3% of total trade of €1.6 trillion). This surplus is explained by the fact that we sell more manufactured goods to the US than we buy. However, if we look at the services balance (which the White House has not taken into account when setting tariffs), we import €109 billion more than we export to the US (2023 data). So far, it seems that we Europeans are not in a very weak position.

Despite the recent pause in the trade war unleashed by the US, the question of what tariff retaliation the European Union could implement without setting itself too high a bar remains open. Overall, the EU exports slightly more to the US than it imports from the US (in 2023, a positive surplus of 3% of total trade of €1.6 trillion). This surplus is explained by the fact that we sell more manufactured goods to the US than we buy. However, if we look at the services balance (which the White House has not taken into account when setting tariffs), we import €109 billion more than we export to the US (2023 data). So far, it seems that we Europeans are not in a very weak position.