Research giant Gartner added to the sovereignty debate by suggesting that only China and the U.S. can boast a completely sovereign cloud.

According to The Register, Douglas Toombs, a VP analyst at Gartner, said buyers can’t escape foreign influence in their cloud systems, with hyperscalers unable to promise complete sovereignty by virtue of being U.S. entities.

Speaking at Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference this week, Toombs poured scorn on European cloud sovereignty efforts such as Gaia-X, as well as customer examples from the continent, namely a Dutch healthcare organization that built its own infrastructure was nonetheless affected by an outage triggered by failures at a supplier and a major cloud provider.

He also pointed to a business principle which argued a stable market rarely has more than three major players – in this case, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft – with the largest no more than four times the size of the smallest. Giving a glimmer of hope, the Gartner analyst added that smaller cloud providers can still succeed, potentially enabling the development of sovereign software as a service (SaaS) platforms and services.

Another Gartner researcher, director analyst Adrian Wong, claimed European organizations are worried hyperscalers might leave the continent should sovereign clouds fail to emerge, forcing them into rushed and ill-thought-out migration projects.

According to the report, Wong added that rising geopolitical tensions are driving hyperscaler customers to rethink their approaches, a shift he supports given how rarely companies prepare an exit strategy.

As explored in SDxCentral’s Sovereignty Supplement, insiders have warned that hyperscaler dependency has become dangerously concentrated and fragile, something exemplified when multiple AWS data centers were recently targeted and physically damaged by drone strikes from Iranian forces. Organizations, therefore, were advised to view sovereignty as a means to ensure resiliency.

Posetiv Cloud CEO Mark Butcher flagged AI as another issue, with supposedly region‑bound tools like Microsoft’s Copilot still running workloads in other regions, should capacity fall short. Frontier models like those from Anthropic and OpenAI, meanwhile, only run from the United States.

As also explored in the supplement, this discrepancy has seen telecom firms take the lead and build sovereign AI ventures to help countries keep control over their critical data and models amid rampant development from international AI developers.

Beyond cloud and AI, Simon Dumbleton, European CTO for World Wide Technology (WWT), reminded this title that European nations remain reliant on other countries for the full-stack supply chain of memory, silicon, and more, a view shared by other experts in prior sovereignty-related debates at SDxCentral events.

Not all doom and Gartner gloom?

Another analyst's view on sovereignty came from Gartner rival Forrester, whose recent Forrester Wave, Sovereign Cloud Platforms report identified the big three for their distinct approaches to digital autonomy.

Google Cloud was lauded for delivering sovereignty through three in-built tiers: a public cloud data boundary for enterprises, locally managed dedicated clouds for operational control, and fully air-gapped Google Distributed Cloud deployments.

Microsoft maintained its leadership in the report by ensuring consistent security and operational controls across both public and private environments, using Azure Local and Azure Arc to unify management in connected or disconnected scenarios.

AWS, meanwhile, was commended for a sovereign-by-design approach, prioritizing deep technical capabilities and ensuring that sovereign environments receive the same level of AI innovation as its standard public cloud offerings.