the "sovereign" label from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle was always a lie, for auditors check boxes

they are not sovereign because they're running software developed by a company liable to coercion by the regime

Cloud is going be far easier to transition for most companies compared to Office, Browsers, OS and Hardware. There are basically no non-american competitors, and so many companies deeply relying on the tech don't have the IT capacity to implement something OSS like Linux.

"Sovereign cloud" is AWS/G-Cloud/Oracle/Azure, but promising to put your data in London if you're the British state, or Frankfurt if you're German and so on...

It's a cute little badge that does very very little to address the real concerns.

The idea that we (Canada, any EU country, etc) can "easily nationalize" data centers running on bespoke hardware that we do not have a supply chain for, bespoke software which we do not control or have the source to, running workloads for customers as dictated by business relationships with a (now hostile) foreign company, with the descriptions of those workloads almost certainly stored in said hostile foreign companies local (i.e. foreign to us) servers... is absurd.

It's even more absurd to suggest that this can be done in response to the US becoming more hostile than they are today. By the time they are more hostile, we're talking about open hostilities. It's only safe to assume that they will have exfiltrated all the data they are interested in, and then sabotaged or destroy as much of the hardware as possible (as can be done remotely), making the data center next to worthless. And prior to nationalization it was "their data-center", they were entirely within their "rights" to sabotage and destroy it.

The time to migrate away from data-centers to minimize geo political risk is now, not when the current data centers operators are actively trying to deal damage.

Similar to that jets effectively would be grounded the second that the US decides they would not be exportable to a former ally, my guess is that not many would, in this scenario, believe a former US owned AWS region in Europe to operate completely autonomously to the degree that it can be “easily” nationalized.

But long before that, I believe there will be other noticeable effects. As someone working in a medium sized European company, with substantial investments across private infrastructures, AWS, GCP and some Azure, I can testify to that since last couple of weeks the Public Cloud Exit strategies around having services being prepared is a very hot topic. This concerns both existing services preparations as well as enforcing standards and configurations for new services.

'Data stays in EU' is not true: the US CLOUD act means that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies can and do access data stored in data centers operated by American companies, whether or not they are on American soil.

What does the hardware give you? These datacenters are dependent on US teams, US processes using US maintained software. It's just a bunch of fast deprecating assets, which would need a full reinstall by a team of an AWS-like entity built from ground up.

this is the same tired argument as to why conventional forces are redundant if you have nuclear weapons, due to MAD

the enemy will never put you into a position where the rational thing to do is to launch your nukes (nationalise their data centres)

but they will push and push up against that line

the way to deal with this is gradual decoupling, ideally backed up by legislation and government subsidy

The risk isn't geopolitical but economic decoupling. American tech valuations will take a bath.

Nationalization of foreign assets occurs at an extreme level of hostility that stable European governments would have no chance of doing, unless it had been done first by the other side. It is the kind of thing that happened in Venezuela.