🦅 MAGA Makes European Cloud Great

Schwarz Digits 🇩🇪 has broken ground on an €11bn data centre in Lübbenau, Brandenburg, on the site of a former coal plant. The facility will eventually house 100,000 GPUs. The target market: European enterprises looking to reduce their exposure to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

The catalyst, oddly enough, is Washington. David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto tsar, recently labelled the DSA a « digital trap designed to extract fines from American companies. » A Section 301 investigation is now in the works, the same mechanism deployed against China. The Trump administration has stopped treating European tech regulation as bureaucratic friction. It now frames it as a competitive threat. That shift in framing is significant.

Every time Washington rattles sanctions or tariffs, it sends a market signal that due diligence teams can no longer ignore: dependence on American hyperscalers is an operational risk. Microsoft admitted before a French court that it could not guarantee data sovereignty under the CLOUD Act. The International Criminal Court lost access to its Microsoft services following US sanctions. The « what if Washington turns off the tap » scenario has migrated from the footnotes of risk registers to the main text.

The ecosystem is repricing accordingly. For the first time in 2025, AI became the leading sector for venture investment across Europe, with roughly €16bn raised, a growing share directed at infrastructure. Nscale 🇬🇧 closed a €1.85bn Series C, a European record, valuing the company at €13.5bn, after already raising €1.4bn earlier in the year to build a full-stack AI cloud platform. Evroc 🇸🇪 launched its sovereign cloud in July, built specifically for sensitive workloads. Mistral 🇫🇷 acquired Koyeb 🇫🇷 to assemble a full-stack sovereign AI cloud, having already committed €1.2bn in Swedish infrastructure. This is no longer the language of policy papers. It is private capital arbitraging geopolitical risk.

The demand side tells the same story. Airbus 🇫🇷🇩🇪 has issued a tender worth over €50m to migrate critical systems to sovereign cloud infrastructure. Gartner forecasts 83% growth in European sovereign cloud in 2026, with the market on course to triple by 2027. The European Commission has put €180m on the table for its own institutions, and 61% of European CIOs say they intend to increase procurement from local providers.

Trump is doing more for European cloud than any subsidy programme could. By turning regulation into a trade casus belli, he has made a risk tangible that CIOs had been content to theorise about without budgeting for. The DSA is heavy, the DMA still ambiguous, the AI Act review pushed to 2027. But the regulatory framework exists, it applies, and it is creating market conditions that American players cannot serve on their own terms. Less spectacular than a unicorn. Considerably more durable.