Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing business, has confirmed further details of its European “sovereign cloud” which is designed to enable greater data residency across the region.
The company said that the first AWS sovereign cloud region will be in the German state of Brandenburg, and will go live by the end of 2025. AWS added that it plans to invest €7.8 billion ($8.5 billion) in the facility through 2040.
The announcement, timed to coincide with the AWS Berlin Summit which is being held in the German capital today and tomorrow, comes some seven months after AWS first revealed plans for a sovereign cloud.
AWS has long offered localized data storage and processing in the European region, but public sector bodies and organizations operating in certain highly-regulated industries have been slower to transition to the public cloud due to data (mis)management concerns — that is, regardless of whatever policies and promises might be in place, the data is still under the control of a U.S. tech giant. Thus, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud comes with even greater data controls, allowing all qualifying customers to keep all their metadata within the EU — and AWS employees based anywhere outside the EU would be unable to access anything contained within the EU.
In other words, the sovereign cloud will be “physically and logically separate” to all other AWS Regions, with the inaugural region based in Germany which will be open to all European customers — this will be available to all organizations across the European continent (including the U.K.)
AWS originally distanced itself from the “sovereign cloud” concept — Amazon chief security officer (CSO) Stephen Schmidt went so far as to call the sovereign cloud “a marketing term more than anything else.” However, in late 2022 AWS announced its “digital sovereignty pledge,” which set about enshrining its data control commitments in stone.
This change in tact was in part due to growing regulatory pressure, but also because its big cloud rivals have been throwing their weight behind the sovereign cloud push, including Microsoft, Google, and even Oracle, which launched its sovereign cloud for EU customers last June.