Introducing the EuroStack initiative: Could this turn the tide on hyperscale cloud in Europe?
If you have not heard of EuroStack, you might first guess it’s merely an EU-centred walled garden for IT. However, the idea is more about levelling the global playing field by building a much more open, collaborative stack.
Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of cloud exchange platform Dynamo, an Italian cloud services company, says EuroStack’s all about teaming up to create a European tech ecosystem alternative, including cloud. The concept answers a new wave of protectionist practice and sovereignty concerns that have increasingly come to the fore worldwide.
“We need to do something. We understand the importance of digital infrastructures, and cloud in particular, as a new strategic infrastructure for the economy, societies, politics and democracy in general,” Bonfiglio tells Computer Weekly.
The hegemony of giant tech firms, often in the US, has continued to loom larger. In cloud, this is signified by the growing dominance of hyperscalers – especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google. Of course, the power of Silicon Valley stems in part from capital investments over decades that cannot today be easily replicated. However, that’s not to say nothing can be done.
A EuroStack pitch document came out in January 2025 which notes that 2024’s Draghi competitiveness report identified that a failure to take “full advantage of the digital revolution” is a key cause of Europe acquiring an “economic laggard” status. An industry-driven initiative, EuroStack therefore seeks to develop an integrated digital ecosystem, with an entire value chain encompassing software, services, hardware and solutions.
According to the 100 or so organisations involved so far, the IT environment has become “fundamentally extractive, with data and economic rents appropriated through unfair bargains between super-dominant providers and us, the dependents”. A growing body of laws and regulations representing “multiple attempts” at competition intervention have failed – and slowed home-grown companies further with compliance demands.
“Further, the ‘occupation’ of spaces is massively accelerating as US hyperscalers are aggressively marketing AI tools and services as key to European growth and prosperity,” it says.
The topline objective is to boost security, redundancy and resilience, opportunities, sovereignty and governance through direct industry action, bottom-up rather than top-down. This should be supported by five policy pillars:
Recognise and define a European digital industrial policy (EDIP) across European commission functions.
Build strategic digital infrastructures, first by aggregating “best of breed” existing assets and supporting them with integration platforms, then by increasing industry collaboration.
Support this aggregation with public and private investments, including in costly parts of the value chain.
Select aligned interventions and measure results in terms of business outcomes that drive economic autonomy.
Seek cooperation with third-party states that share common goals.
In a sense, EuroStack appears a successor to a more or less stillborn Gaia-X. Bonfiglio says the Gaia-X concept had “the political message” but less of a clear action plan. One key for EuroStack is ensuring organisations and consumers trust digital services and platforms. Technological quality and innovation is available in Europe, if not always adequately commercialised. Also, many remain nervous about data handling, privacy and intellectual property (IP).
“We need to make that simple,” Bonfiglio says. “We need transparency, controllability and interoperability. And if you want to lock me in, I won’t let you in.”
Cloud federation has to go beyond technical federation too because no single operator will invest in becoming interoperable with another without related business opportunities.
Concretely, cloud services providers Aruba, Ionos and Dynamo have just introduced the Sovereign European Cloud API (SECA) as a best-in-class industry standard for cloud infrastructure management. The next requirement is for potential customers to be able to find the European solutions they need.
Bonfiglio says providers all over the world can and perhaps should build their own version of EuroStack, even organisations from the US itself: “They don’t want to be hostage to these three private companies either.”
Cloud infrastructure services investment globally is still growing. Canalys reported 20% year over year to Q4 2024 and similar for 2025. However, 64% of that total spend is on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Bonfiglio estimates that European providers have less than a 10% share of the market – and that share is shrinking, with most European datacentre capacity already either owned or rented by hyperscalers.
“In 2028, hyperscalers will likely control 75% of our datacentres. It’s an application of ancient colonisation techniques – only now it’s not tea plantations but GW and square metres,” says Bonfiglio. “But we can start to change this now, leveraging our existing assets.”
Nicky Stewart, senior adviser at the Open Cloud Coalition, retains doubts regarding strategy. After all, managing change across 27 member states remains “incredibly complex”. Regulation needs harmonisation, or even strengthening, and addressing competition could be simpler, she suggests.
“Certainly the hyperscalers have become all-powerful in technology; there’s been fast growth, enormous concentration, and, if you like, anti-competitive business practices,” Stewart says. “Buyers don’t always want the homogeneous, one-size-fits-all answer when it can be better provided with better customer service – and often keener pricing – by other cloud providers.”
Stevenage-based cloud services provider Civo is also a member of the Open Cloud Coalition. Chief commercial officer Simon Hansford adds that options are needed, with digital sovereignty entailing differential data handling. Some data is far more important and private. The way you handle, store and share it should recognise that.
“Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t travel abroad, but that we put more economic value on it,” adds Hansford.
EuroStack as it is envisaged would better recognise the value of data and related industries. If you do not have sovereignty over a given resource, you control how you drive value.
“A clear example might be Airbus. Europe decided to build its own aircraft, rather than becoming a manufacturing site or maintenance site for Boeing, which would have been very easy to do,” says Hansford.
Today, this appears to have been a good decision. Without recognition of value, it can be very difficult to develop a local ecosystem – from education, training and certification to OEM – that drives jobs and businesses beyond indirect sales and services.
“The majority of Europe’s cloud professionals are in sales, marketing, pre-sales engineering and the like. AWS and Microsoft might say they’ve got 1,000-2,000 people in the UK, but if they’re all pre-sales, there’s no research or core engineering done there,” Hansford points out. “We have got to start creating demand by moving money away from the hyperscalers into our local industry.”
Solange Viegas Dos Reis, chief legal officer at French infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider OVHCloud, points out that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have power that extends beyond cloud as well. “They have more and more power, and use that to strengthen what they have in other markets too,” she says.
OVHCloud has signed up. With EuroStack, business and industry have finally understood the direct impact that politics, and indeed geopolitics, can have on economics, she says, adding: “We need to get rid of dependencies on other countries where the political pressure can have a direct effect on us.”
Freedom of choice and innovation might be achieved by having a more open provider or by developing some smaller stacks with collaborative interoperability and transparency, with “good strategic partners” from outside the EU also involved.
She notes that when your data is hosted on hyperscaler servers, there is a risk that your activity competes with one or more of theirs, because they are so large and dominant. Or that it can be accessed by other governments for reasons with which you would not agree. Data and digital sovereignty is about more than competition.
“EuroStack makes me hope that we may go faster and be more precise on the needs,” she says. “It’s quite ambitious, for sure, but it’s driven by economics, business and industry, and with strong leaders. It’s not just a couple of lawyers in the room trying to make more regulation.”
Tackling the issues with regulation, top down, has not worked so far. Of course, it’s a challenge, not least because it involves companies from diverse sectors up and down tech stacks. And there will likely be resistance from some.
“We must coordinate everyone and identify the common challenges and elements,” Viegas Does Reis says. “But the objective will benefit all the world, the whole tech ecosystem.”
Mark Neufurth, lead strategist and programme manager for SECA at cloud services provider Ionos, agrees that EuroStack models an initiative that could benefit organisations worldwide, and that is important.
“While there’s no [actual EuroStack progress] development as of now, Europe has to develop a ‘target picture’ in the light of current politics, which are changing fast,” he says. “Otherwise, we will be out of business in a matter of years in terms of digitisation and digital things.”
That’s all while the hyperscalers are still coming to, for instance, Berlin or wherever to take advantage of local innovation, Neufurth adds.
Meanwhile, EuroStack has seven layers and takes a “huge work package” to get it off the ground. Software, hardware and services must be defined, resourced and built. Local problems, including potential inertia, must be overcome. That said, there are already European designs for low-energy chips here, and the cloud API standard SECA, so that should all help, Neufurth says.
Of course, economies of scale must be developed. Other organisations, in other countries, can and should develop similar initiatives, including the UK – but partnering is key. Overall, however, the vision will take years, even decades, to materialise, Neufurth adds.
“Nonetheless, we need this. It’s essential that we emancipate ourselves a bit from China and the USA,” he says. “And there’ll be less of a single point for failures, and of course better competition.”
Read more about competition in the cloud market
CCS Insight’s Bola Rotibi looks at the Competition and Markets Authority’s plans to regulate the public cloud.
With the dominant hold that Amazon and Microsoft has on the global cloud market under scrutiny by regulators across the world, could 2025 usher in a new era of cloud competition?
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