European spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is set to triple in the next two years, according to research from Gartner.

The analyst house is predicting that in Europe, spending on sovereign cloud will increase 83% to $12.6 billion this year, and again to $23.1 billion in 2027.

Sovereignty has increasingly become a concern for European organizations, with geopolitical tensions demonstrating the current heavy reliance on U.S. or Chinese hyperscalers for cloud computing services.

Globally, Gartner is predicting that spending on sovereign cloud services in 2026 will hit $80 billion, an overall growth of 35.6%. By region, this breaks down to the Middle East and Africa (MEA) growing at 89%, Asia Pacific (APAC) growing at 87%, while in the U.S. growth will come it at 29%, and in China at 26%.

While Europe is seeing a slightly lower growth percentage rate, this is from a larger base level than the MEA and APAC regions, with spending in 2025 already at around $6.9 billion.

“As geopolitical tensions rise, organizations outside the U.S. and China are investing more in sovereign cloud IaaS to gain digital and technological independence,” said Rene Buest, senior director analyst at Gartner. “The goal is to keep wealth generation within their own borders to strengthen the local economy.”

Of the new spending, around 20% will see current workloads shifted from global to local providers, while the remaining 80% will come from new digital solutions or the modernization of legacy workloads.

Much of the concern around hyperscaler reliance finds its footing in the U.S. CLOUD Act, which means that the U.S. government can compel U.S. companies to provide data regardless of where it is stored.

While such requests are few and far between, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) previously affirming that "no law enforcement request has resulted in the disclosure to the United States government of AWS enterprise or government content data stored outside the United States" since it began reporting the statistic in July 2020, other instances have highlighted how much reliance is placed upon the U.S. hyperscalers.

In July 2025, Rosneft-backed Indian energy company Nayara Energy claimed that Microsoft had cut off cloud services to the company due to European Union (EU) sanctions on the oil company.

Last May, Microsoft allegedly cut off its services to the International Criminal Court on the orders of the Trump administration. In that instance, the court’s chief prosecutor lost access to his email address, though it should be noted that Microsoft has denied “ceasing or suspending its services to the ICC.” The ICC later decided to stop using Microsoft Office for its internal work environment.

Meanwhile, the October 2025 major AWS outage, although localized in a U.S. data center, brought down some of the U.K. government's online services, including Revenue and Customs (HMRC). It was then revealed that the government was spending some $1.7 billion on the cloud provider.

Groups including digital rights organization Open Rights Group (ORG) have pushed for governments to lean more heavily on local sovereign providers.

In October 2025, the European Commission launched a tender for the procurement of sovereign cloud computing services valued at $209 million. The contract will span six years and see the awarded company provide EU institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies with sovereign cloud services.

AWS, Google, and Microsoft have aimed to assuage concerns by launching enhanced sovereign cloud computing offerings, but there are still those pushing for the continent to use local providers.