Deutsche Telekom (DT) expanded its T Cloud Public cloud offering to secure a fully-fledged, sovereign alternative for Europe in a bid to support the European Union’s (EU’s) data sovereignty ambitions.

The company has pledged that by the end of 2026, T Cloud Public will close the feature gap with U.S. providers to deliver scalable infrastructure and specialized AI services. DT will also add an automated migration tool alongside professional services to support users’ sovereignty journey to eliminate U.S. dependency, ensuring complete European sovereignty.

“We are ending the era of either-or decisions," Ferri Abolhassan, CEO of DT subsidiary T-Systems, explained. "Until now, companies had to choose between maximum functionality from overseas or European sovereignty. With T Cloud Public, we now deliver the best of both worlds. We are not just building a sovereign cloud, we are building the digital foundation for a competitive and free Europe.”

With the expansion, DT positions itself as one of the few European alternatives operating on a technological level comparable to global cloud providers.

According to Information Services Group (ISG), the expanded platform outperforms European alternatives and is already more competitive than some offerings from other technology companies.

Push for foundational sovereignty and security

The T Cloud Public platform is said to follow a security-by-design approach, built on a modern zero-trust architecture. This means that DT enables fully EU-compliant data processing in European data centers, strictly protected against access by third countries.

The operator promises that this goes beyond software security alone, claiming users are guaranteed comprehensive legal and operational sovereignty under European law and standards.

“We continuously challenge our own level of sovereignty, using our telecommunication industry regulations as a key benchmark, and are exploring ways to become even more independent,” T-Systems Chief Sovereignty Officer Christine Knackfuss added.

Another promised advantage of the platform is direct access to scarce GPU resources via DT’s sovereign Industrial AI Cloud high-performance computing (HPC) platform, which enables compute-intensive AI applications without the need for proprietary server hardware.

Set to go live on February 4, the company claims the Nvidia-supported Industrial AI Cloud will increase the available GPU capacity in Germany by 50% to form Europe’s largest sovereign AI infrastructure.

“The platform automates many background processes, already delivers 80% of the familiar core hyperscaler features, and significantly reduces IT administration effort. By the end of 2026, we will reach full core feature parity,” Abolhassan pledged.

In another recent sovereignty step, DT partnered with Leibniz University for sovereign AI in Europe. As part of the partnership, DT secured a multimillion-dollar contract with Germany's Leibniz University Hannover to provide a sovereign large language model (LLM) trained and operated entirely in Europe.

DT and its T-Systems arm have advanced their efforts to meet the growing digital sovereignty demands. Another recent example saw it appoint Knackfuss, becoming one of the first vendors to appoint a chief sovereignty officer.

Deutsche Telekom is also attempting to reposition itself from a traditional carrier to one of Europe’s core AI infrastructure players, particularly as European industries require AI capacity compatible with the continent’s stringent data-sovereignty rules and risk frameworks.