Europe must build its own cloud

We tend to take for granted the infrastructure on which our economies and societies run — until something goes wrong.

- Robin Berjon

Just ask residents of Spain and Portugal, who were suddenly faced with a total blackout last April, when a series of cascading voltage surges shut down their electricity grids. Both Spain and Portugal are now pursuing massive investments in strengthening their grids' resilience. But citizens should not have to wait until after a disaster strikes for their leaders to commit to investing in critical infrastructure, which nowadays includes cloud services.

From storing and backing up data to powering and deploying AI systems, “the cloud” underpins the digital economy. But control over this infrastructure is highly concentrated, with just three US companies — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — controlling over 60% of the global market. As a result, the failure of just one of these services can cost the global economy billions of dollars. That is not a far-fetched scenario. In fact, such failures happen regularly. Just last month, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted the functioning of thousands of services worldwide, including messaging apps, banking platforms and home security cameras. Days later, Microsoft Azure suffered a similar global outage.

So far, such events have been accidental. But cloud infrastructure could be wielded as a geopolitical weapon. Since the three main providers operate under US jurisdiction, they are subject to the whims of American authorities, who may well compel them to suspend services as a means of punishment or coercion.