AWS confirms European sovereign cloud will launch in Germany in 2025, plans investment of €7.8 billion over 15 years

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing company, has confirmed further details of its European ‘sovereign cloud’, which is designed to enable greater data locality across the region.

The company said the first AWS sovereign cloud region will be in the German state of Brandenburg and will go live in late 2025. AWS added that it plans to invest €7.8 billion ($8.5 billion) in the facility through 2040.

The announcement, apparently timed to coincide with the AWS Summit of Berlin held today and tomorrow in the German capital, comes about seven months after AWS first unveiled plans for a sovereign cloud.

Highly regulated

AWS has long offered localized data storage and processing in the European region, but government agencies and organizations operating in certain highly regulated industries have been slower to adopt the public cloud due to concerns about data (mis)management – ​​that is, regardless of which policies and whatever promises a hyperscaler has, the data is ultimately still under the control of an American tech giant. So the AWS European Sovereign Cloud comes with even greater data controls, allowing all eligible customers to keep all their metadata within the EU – and AWS employees based somewhere outside the EU would not have access to anything that is within the EU EU is located.

In other words, the sovereign cloud will be “physically and logically separated” from all other AWS regions.

AWS originally moved away from the “sovereign cloud” concept – Amazon Chief Security Officer (CSO) Stephen Schmidt even went so far as to phone call the sovereign cloud “a marketing term more than anything.” However, in late 2022, AWS announced its “digital sovereignty pledge,” setting its data control commitments in stone.

This change in tactics was partly due to increasing regulatory pressure, but also because major cloud rivals have thrown their support behind the sovereign cloud push, including Microsoft, Google and even Oracle, which launched its sovereign cloud for EU customers launched. .

Part of the multibillion-dollar investment will involve creating new roles to support Europe’s sovereign cloud, such as software engineers, systems developers and solution architects, while the company also touts that it will create “an average of 2,800 full-time equivalent jobs in the sector to support”. local German companies” annually through its supply chain, which includes disciplines such as construction, facilities maintenance and telecommunications.