>Sovereign cloud datacenters

What does this actually mean? A superficial read suggests it's datacentres where some European country owns the hardware, but if Microsoft controls the Azure software running there, then they retain all the control? In what way are they "sovereign"?

Interesting how this trick plays out. After drastic changes on the part of Trump, it became obvious Europe needs, among others, strong EU-based datacenters for public use ("European cloud"). Now, a big American cloud claims they will build an European cloud.

Who's going to buy it, though? AWS, Google and Microsoft do have European datacenters and many users here use these regions but the whole point is to be politically, financially, and "privacy-ally" completely independent from the USA. Not to mention Azure might not be the most secure of public clouds.

Related:

Microsoft vows to protect European operations

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43846985

30-apr-2025

Sovereignty needs to be viewed as a full stack pursuit, where at each point in the supply chain - from cobalt in the ground to email with document attached - a question must be posed whether the EU is at correct degree of ability to operate without each current trading partner. That includes considerations of stockpiling, relationship stability & adversity, shipping lanes, and many other things. The complexity isn’t noticed because for 99.9% of things we’ve settled into comfy patterns.

Slicing at the cloud (Azure) without considering “above” or “below” isn’t detailed enough. There are technologies and supply chains EU has neglected that need to be restarted. The industrial policy needed to do this will stimulate amazing innovations Europe can one day be proud of.

But man is it hard to add an eclipsed capability to an advanced economy. It’ll be in the difficulty ballpark of bringing high speed rail to the US.