"Discussions are indeed underway", an OVHcloud spokesperson confirmed after Euractiv sought comment.
The European Commission is in advanced business negotiations with OVHcloud, the France-based major European cloud service provider, to transition its cloud services away from Microsoft, according to three senior sources with internal knowledge of the matter who spoke to Euractiv on condition of anonymity.
The infrastructure shift is being driven by a push for European digital sovereignty in the cloud market, following concerns raised by a US executive order that led to the shutdown of Microsoft services for an employee of a European-based institution.
The goal of the move would be to ensure that European institutions have greater control over their digital infrastructure and data – an idea that has been championed by the EuroStack initiative. It is also a blow for US tech behemoth Microsoft, which has been striving to reassure its European customers in the past weeks.
Once the European Commission "gets its house into order," it is expected to set a precedent for national public administrations to direct public procurement funds towards homegrown cloud providers, one source said. The Commission sees itself as a trend setter, they added, aligning with its broader strategy to enhance the EU's digital autonomy and reduce reliance on non-European tech giants.
We understand the Commission has been in discussions with OVHcloud for several weeks. However, an unknown number of other European cloud providers, including Germany's IONOS, France's Scaleway and Italy's Aruba, are also being considered as potential alternatives.
A unique aspect of this situation is that, for the first time, the two key digital departments of the Commission – DG CNECT, which drafts and enforces digital policies, and DG DIGIT, the IT department – are under the oversight of a single Commissioner (Henna Virkkunen) with a tech sovereignty portfolio.
This consolidation has made it easier to harmonise the political and technical priorities of the European executive, our sources told us.
"Discussions are indeed underway, both with the Commission and with other public and private institutions and organisations that are evaluating projects to migrate to a sovereign cloud," an OVHcloud spokesperson told Euractiv when we sought comment.
The Commission is "constantly scanning the market" and already "has a contract with OVHcloud" a Commission spokesperson said in response to Euractiv's request for comment. It did not confirm whether the Commission will actually switch away from Microsoft Azure.
In January, Euractiv revealed that the Commission was concerned about its reliance on Microsoft, quoting internal documents.
Additionally, the EU institutions watchdog, the European Data Protection Supervisor found last year that the EU's executive is in breach of data protection rules that apply to EU institutions over its use of Microsoft Azure cloud for some of its data.
(nl)
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Comments
This is great. While i dont agree with the vast majority of conservative viewpoints, a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of
People might raise the point that these native tech service providers arent as mature as the american giants. But that maturity can only be acheived through healthy local consumption. Once the EU uses them, and makes it lucrative for local competition to pop up, then they will rise to the challenge. This is great
> a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of
It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons.
Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities.
However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field.
Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
By IsTom 2025-06-2021:07 > It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations
That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.
By samrus 2025-06-2213:22 globalism
the idea that forming a tight reciprocal network of economic dependency will prevent petty politics and align everyone towards cooperation, or starving.
it seemed like a good idea but now its seeming more and more like an economic version of bismarck's pre-WW1 "balance of power" strategy.
why did that fail to prevent WW1? my guess is that its an unstable equilibrium in the short term, a prisoners dilemma where, in the short term, one party can benefit more from betrayal than from cooperation.
why do humans tend to go for the short term gain of betrayal versus the long term gain of cooperation? idk, but it seems intrinsic to us because i think the "thrown out of eden" parable is folk wisdom about this same thing
> no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies
Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.
By bobthepanda 2025-06-2021:06 There used to be more cross border banking until the Eurozone crisis exposed the structural flaw that under the regulations back then (and probably still currently) national regulators were responsible for bailing out headquartered banks, so you had small countries like Cyprus going belly-up because they had to bail out large cross-border banks.
VC markets are definitely not cross-border in practice.
Until recently, the United States was seen as a reliable friend. So the benefits of aggregation from a cost and interoperability perspective outweighed the risk.
Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.
By Alupis 2025-06-2021:13 EU member nations have been attempting to diversify for as long as the EU has existed. Germany famously went down the Linux Workstation path and eventually gave up, instead of applying adequate resources to build a competing product.
There's no reason these things cannot succeed. Apple pulled it off with MacOS (built on BSD). It's just attention span, resources, regulations and the political will.
It's much easier to just buy Microsoft and hope for the best.
By sisve 2025-06-2021:03 I think a big big reason for that there is no Big tech companies in Europe is really that the landscape is so much more diverse then in the US.
If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.
I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2021:56 > It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones
Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.
By bootsmann 2025-06-2021:07 The EU didn’t even exist by the time the last FAANG company was founded, Apple predates the fall of the iron curtain, so I doubt the EU is to blame for this (especially because Europe dominates in markets where integration has been going on for longer such a precision manufacturing)
By nicoburns 2025-06-2020:57 It depends how big you are. If you're the UK or France or Germany, then sure, it makes sense (but you still have less scale than the US). If you're Luxembourg or Macedonia then you probably dont have the resources and at least need to collaborate with your neighbours.
By dvfjsdhgfv 2025-06-219:00 > anti-business/startup policies
Which ones, exactly? I heard this phrase tossed around but on close examination it always turns out it something related to protecting the citizen. Which I believe, is a conscious choice on this side of the ocean.
By tonyhart7 2025-06-2021:03 because other nations don't have same capabilities or resources
same like US not producing their own food and equipment
By im3w1l 2025-06-2021:27 Sure but you can ask that at different scales, in a reductio ad absurdum: Why should EU use American tech company? But also why should Germany use French tech company? Why should one region of France use tech company from other region? Why should one person use tech from another person?
By Barrin92 2025-06-2021:10 > founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
the answer is very simple, raising capital. It has nothing to do with regulations, filling out paperwork in Germany is annoying but doesn't stop you, not having money or a market does.
Internal barriers of trade in the EU, the heterogenity of the countries and users and the lack of a deep financial sector across the union is what does most businesses in.
By jorgenveisdal 2025-06-2020:462 reply A lot of "mature" American software is garbage as well. Epic Systems has (thus far) been a disaster in the UK, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Norway.
By toomuchtodo 2025-06-2020:55 An open source electronic healthcare system is well within scope of a union providing healthcare for ~449M people collectively. Epic does ~$5B/year in revenue, certainly the EU can do better with the same spend or a bit less.
By mathgradthrow 2025-06-2020:551 reply It has also been a disaster in the US, to be fair.
I'm fairly certain it's a natural law carved into stone that the "Bigger" the Enterprise, the more their software is held together with duct tape, shoe string, and band-aides.
Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.
This likely happens when internal politics completely replace whatever somehow objective quality metrics, and the sales force becomes persuasive beyond reason.
«The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function.
The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.»
By Alupis 2025-06-2021:10 Additionally, it seems the big enterprise vendors will cook up any solution to whatever problem (perceived or real) a customer says they have - no matter how out-of-domain it might be for the expertise of the enterprise vendor.
We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do".
We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.
By delfinom 2025-06-2021:21 I would argue metrics, even objective quality metrics still lead to enterprise software. Hanlon's razor never fails.
Just because your software ain't throwing exceptions, doesn't mean they don't wish death on 3 generations of the developers family.
And real users, that are actually productive in their employ, aren't the ones taking surveys
By elcritch 2025-06-2021:18 I have a rule of thumb that the more a piece of software costs, the crappier it will be.
Interesting, when was the last time an AWS DC burned down?
I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.
I'm unsure if this is fair to OVH. Yes, they had a pretty epic fire not long ago - but their "bread and butter" has been low cost, from what I've gathered (never used them before).
I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc.
I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.
By everfrustrated 2025-06-2021:57 Wasn't it worse than that too - their supposedly independent data centres were all sitting literally next to each other
By blibble 2025-06-2021:17 still a lower risk than having your entire country's internet services turned off by the US regime to gain political leverage
OVH has been getting a lot better.
They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1.
It's starting to look like a real cloud.
By neepi 2025-06-2020:59 [flagged]
By ahofmann 2025-06-2020:41 Ovh has a lot of products. Some of them are cheap and the services quality acts accordingly. OVH is mostly pretty good.
By silisili 2025-06-2021:04 While not using it on a huge scale, I've got a few projects in OVH cloud(US) and can't remember them having ever gone down in the last couple years.
I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right.
Is your experience different?
By tetha 2025-06-2020:58 There is also this weird question: What do you get from your hoster?
For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age?
And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well.
If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money.
If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years.
But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
By lossolo 2025-06-2020:46 Care to elaborate? I've been using their different products for around 20 years.
By belter 2025-06-2020:58 They also use a lot of AWS...
By justahuman74 2025-06-2019:366 reply It's simply irresponsible for the EU to depend so heavily on the US for sovereign-critical activities
By stego-tech 2025-06-2019:415 reply Seriously. I wrote about it in March and have been banging on this particular drum since my first client demand to move wholesale into AWS.
https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/
For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.
Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
"from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights"
what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???
By hkpack 2025-06-210:22 Not yet, but it is just irresponsible to wait with hope and prayers.
Some people are just extrapolating and see that US is pregnant with authoritarianism.
By belter 2025-06-2021:00 I asked specifically about this threat, to two employees of AWS and they laughed on my face. To quote Nigel Farage...I guess they are probably not laughing now....
> could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price
specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.
By yjftsjthsd-h 2025-06-2020:36 Er, so now you're on AWS and instead of paying a sysadmin to run things, you pay a DevOps Engineer™ to run things. Just because it's in The Cloud doesn't magically remove the need to manage it.
By freeone3000 2025-06-2020:31 You still need an admin for AWS. It doesn’t actually abstract anything about services or workloads; it’s not Heroku.
By stego-tech 2025-06-2019:533 reply I mean, I know all that now; it's what kicked off my descent into the politics and ideologies I hold near and dear to me now, and revitalized my interest in technology as a means of helping humans instead of amplifying Capital.
My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense. It's penny-wise and pound foolish, given how (relatively) inexpensive a VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin is nowadays compared to anyone with AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials.
China is proof of that with their own universe of cloud services, there's no reason Europe can't be competitive the same way, the talent is there, it needs capital and government push.
By tonyhart7 2025-06-2021:15 China is one huge economy that centrally planned + strive for sustainable themselves is not easy to achieve for EU
China software industry is 10 times size of Europe. It is easier when you are big.
By disgruntledphd2 2025-06-2116:29 It is now, yes. Would it be if the great firewall didn't exist, though?
> My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense.
You don't know, but you proved your customer's point, unwillingly.
The thing is, your logic is flawed because it's (incredibly) shortsighted.
> VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin
Those three things essentially do the same thing, yet they're completely different beasts. You have to look for people knowledgeable on that specific product, and you might not find them.
When dealing with AWS EC2 instances? A lot more people with standardized competencies.
For companies it's just great because they can hire from a much larger pool of candidates.
It's great for workers too, because they can pick my skills and go work at another company where I'll be immediately productive, meaning they'll have a much smoother onboarding process (learning the business domain rather than fighting the technology).
By watermelon0 2025-06-2020:31 Same applies for clouds, each is a completely different beast. You have AWS EC2, GCE, Azure VM, and others.
The main difference between cloud vs on-prem/colo/dedicated is that you need SRE/DevOps for the first, and sysadmins for the second.
By immibis 2025-06-2020:31 > VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin
What happened to the idea of just running a program on a machine?
Or Kubernetes. Everyone loves Kubernetes, why not use it?
By mistrial9 2025-06-2019:58 yes I agree, more than I can say in a short post
AWS is also hard to administer. Sure you don't have to deal with physical hardware, but you don't at Hetzner, either.
By ranger_danger 2025-06-2021:001 reply I have never had any issues with AWS, and I don't know anyone else that has either. I'm sure some might consider it difficult, but I don't think that the vast majority do, and I don't consider that enough of a reason to blanket state that it's hard for everyone... otherwise they wouldn't be using it anyway.
By immibis 2025-06-218:49 Are you using it for virtual servers or for all their serverless stuff?
I've never had any issues with real servers, either. Not even a hard drive failure (touch wood). I'm sure some might consider servers difficult, but [the rest of your comment]
By mcv 2025-06-2020:05 It already was before, and it's doubly true now. There's always been tension between the EU's and the US's view on privacy and data protection, and it's only getting worse.
By firesteelrain 2025-06-2020:161 reply Azure Europe is located in data centers in Norway, Germany, Netherlands, France and others.
The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign.
There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though.
But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office
Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo.
Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems
You’re trusting that Microsoft is maintaining meaningful segmentation for their dozen different clouds. History suggests they do not. At best, you’re getting data residency from Microsoft. Key components, like Entra, are globally shared services.
By firesteelrain 2025-06-2022:16 Entra (Azure AD) is indeed a globally shared service. But Microsoft has been moving toward regional anchoring with things like the EU Data Boundary.
If Europe wants full-stack control, they’ll need to build it
By ranger_danger 2025-06-2020:561 reply > This is an empirically observed fact.
No, this is demonstrably false. There are many entire organizations whose sole purpose is to monitor responsibilities and prepare for crises.
By belter 2025-06-2021:04 Both your statement, at least in current phrasing, and the one you replied to, are correct at the same time.
> Organizations like the SEC ...sole purpose is to monitor responsibilities and prepare for crises, but they could not care less...
I don't think OVH is anywhere near the level of AWS/GCP/Azure in terms of the quality of the infrastructure and networking. They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices. They built a data center out of wood, with no fire suppression, and it burned down, taking businesses with it: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
By whynotmaybe 2025-06-2020:47 You're right, it's not anywhere where the major US cloud vendors are.
Microsoft isn't much better : https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-releases-details-las...
I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas.
I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
By dwroberts 2025-06-2020:44 > They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices.
You might want to contrast with Azure's recent security record. Microsoft is letting it seriously slide
Agreed. It's laughable how many incidents OVH has on a monthly basis.
That being said, I'm all for the EU using EU products, and hopefully it only means OVH gets better over time.
By bravesoul2 2025-06-2021:061 reply Might be a feature. A chaos monkey. What do you do when your provider is like this: use a second cloud for resilience.
By physhster 2025-06-2021:46 For cheap bulk compute, it's probably ok, but where would you serve your actual critical prod from?
By matteocontrini 2025-06-217:47 It got better though, especially with the new 3-AZ regions.
By TiredOfLife 2025-06-217:09 On the other hand they do have the occasional rapid unscheduled burning down of a datacenter.
By neepi 2025-06-2021:01 Their recovery process was terrible as well. Wash everything, drop a load of PR stuff out about how good they were washing stuff, then hope it worked. What a shit show. I would never even go near them after that.
By artursapek 2025-06-2021:02 lol
