The European Commission has awarded its €180 million sovereign cloud framework contract to four provider groups: Post Telecom (with CleverCloud and OVHcloud), StackIT, Scaleway, and a Proximus consortium partnering with S3NS (a Thales–Google Cloud joint venture) and Mistral AI. The six-year contract covers cloud services for EU institutions and bodies. A notable policy outcome is the inclusion of the Proximus–S3NS consortium, which runs on Google Cloud infrastructure, establishing that non-European technology can qualify as 'sovereign' if operated under sufficiently strict governance. The Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework evaluates providers across eight objectives including legal, operational, and security criteria. The result is also positioned as a procurement template for EU member states, feeding into the broader Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) debate about whether US hyperscalers can qualify for public procurement through compliant-operation models.
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