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ZDNET Highlights
- Europeans are moving away from US-based products and services.
- The reason for this is the lack of trust in American tech companies and the government.
- Open-source-based companies are benefiting the most.
Unlike any other tech conference I’ve attended in the last few years, this is the top issue 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe But Ecole Polytechnique Paris was not AI. Shocking, I know. In fact, OpenInfra Foundation General manager Thierry Carrez commented, “Did you notice what I didn’t talk about in my keynote? I made no mention of AI.” But one issue that came up – and would appear again and again in keynote speeches, halls and vendor booths – was digital sovereignty.
Digital sovereignty is the ability of a country, organization or individual to control its own digital infrastructure, technologies, data and online processes without undue external dependence on foreign entities or large technology companies. In other words, Europeans are tired of trusting what they increasingly see as unreliable American companies and the American government.
Also: German state replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email
Carrez explained: “We have seen long-standing alliances between the US and the EU being questioned or leveraged for immediate gain. We have seen the terms of exchange of goods changing almost every day. And as a response to this, in Europe, we are moving towards digital sovereignty.” In turn, that shift means open-source software.
Carrage added, “The world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure that remains interoperable and secure while tightly collaborating with AI, containers and trusted execution environments. Open infrastructure allows nations and organizations to maintain control over their applications, their data and their fate, while benefiting from global collaboration.”
Carrez thinks the better word for what Europe wants is not isolation from the US: “What we’re really looking for is flexibility. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves is flexibility. Flexibility in the face of unexpected events in a rapidly changing world. Open source,” he concludes, “allows us to be sovereign without being isolated.”
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OVHCloud Founder Octave Klaba echoed the theme of freedom rooted in flexibility. “From day one, sovereignty played a real role in the development of OVH,” he said. Childhood in communist Poland, he explained, instilled a “healthy paranoia” about centralization.
This stance led OVH to build its own hardware, design local legal structures, and establish strong jurisdictional separation between subsidiaries. “We provide services with the high fiscal and legal separation that many clients are looking for,” Klaba said. “I never believed that the global world was sustainable – my vision was that, ultimately, it would be the return of countries and regions.”
This approach to sovereignty is not just about words. In the past year, several EU governments have abandoned Microsoft software and services for open-source solutions. This movement includes the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which abandoned Exchange and Outlook for open-source programs. Other agencies that have taken the same path as Microsoft include the Austrian military, Danish government organizations and the French city of Lyon.
Furthermore, the European Commission appointed Hanna Virkkunen as its first Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy in 2024. Their task is to counter the increasingly complex security threats facing the EU, including over-dependence on non-European technical services.
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For example, the French Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NuboA cloud-based initiative for sensitive data and services. it OpenStack-based private cloud Work has been going on for years. Looking ahead, NUBO is building a Kubernetes-based cloud. Once completed, the French ministry plans to create or contribute to a sovereign Kubernetes distribution.
To make users’ lives easier – and naturally make profits – many European companies are now offering technology programs to help users achieve digital sovereignty. Deutsche Telekom is also involved in these programs Open Telecom Cloudand ovh, stackitAnd vanillacoreEach of these companies relies on OpenStack to power their European-based cloud offerings for individuals, companies, and governments. Additionally, other European open-source-based technology businesses, such as SUSE and NextCloud, provide digital sovereignty solutions using other programs.
In conversations at the conference, it became clear that although changes in US government policy are worrying Europeans, it is not just politics that worries them. People are also upset with Microsoft’s 365 price hike. Another technical business issue that has troubled them is the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom and the huge increase in prices that followed. This has led to an increase in the use of open-source office software, such as libre officeand its web-based brother, collaboration onlineand this Migration of VMware customers to OpenStack-based services,
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The issue of sovereignty is not going to end. As Carreras said at a press conference: “It’s top of mind in the EU at the moment, everybody’s just talking about it, and everybody’s doing it.” Open source is essential to this movement. as Mike McDonough, head of software product management at cachengo“Sovereign by Design,” the cloud company said: “No one can shut you down; no one can take it away from you, and if someone decides to fork the code, you can continue to adopt it anywhere in the world.”
Overall, participants agreed that Europe’s sovereign cloud movement is reaching critical mass as governments and enterprises move data back from US-based hyperscalers. European organizations are realizing that they need more private infrastructure capacity and local talent to run large cloud initiatives. So, they’re turning to open source because, as Carrez concludes, “What makes us resilient is our open-source community.”
