EU to pour €10bn into building up European cloud

The European Union has pledged to spend up to €10bn over the next seven years to help build up a home grown cloud computing sector to take on the current foreign market leaders AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba.

In a joint declaration by 25 member states, the bloc signed the European Alliance on Industrial Data and Cloud as "the first stone in building European cloud technology."

"Advancing European cloud offers is essential to increase the competitiveness of European businesses and provide European citizens, as well as public administrations and companies everywhere," the EU Commission said in statement.

With the 2016 EU-US Privacy Shield framework having been invalidated by a July ruling by the European Court of Justice, the Commission said "a resilient and competitive European supply for the public and private sector needs" is needed more than ever."

"There is a common understanding that it is vital that any data can be stored and processed in Europe, according to European rules and standards. That will be a key pillar of our digital sovereignty for this Digital Decade and will propel Europe's recovery, ensure long-term competitiveness and help us reach climate sustainability."

The EU says it is now working on pooling resources from among member states to find "cross-border synergies".

The alliance will be launched by the end of the year.

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• Topics
• Vendor
• European Union
• AWS
• GCP
• Alibaba
• European Alliance on Industrial Data
• EU Commission