Overview
- The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is physically and legally separate from other AWS regions, designed to keep customer data within the bloc.
- The first region is in Brandenburg, Germany, with planned extensions to Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal backed by an investment of more than €7.8 billion through 2040.
- AWS says the environment has no critical dependencies on non‑EU infrastructure and can continue operating if links to the wider internet are disrupted or software exports are restricted.
- Governance sits with an EU‑controlled parent and German subsidiaries staffed by EU residents, with Stéphane Israël appointed to lead the unit and Stefan Hoechbauer named managing director alongside a new advisory board.
- Initial availability spans 90 services across compute, storage, databases, networking, security and AI, as regulators review major cloud providers under the DMA in a market where AWS, Microsoft and Google hold about 70%.