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ZDNET's key takeaways
Europeans are moving away from US-based products and services.
This is due to a loss of trust in American tech companies and the government.
Open-source-based companies are benefiting the most.
Unlike any tech conference I've attended in the last few years, the top issue at the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe at the École Polytechnique Paris was not AI. Shocking, I know. Indeed, OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez commented, "Did you notice what I didn't talk about in my keynote? I made no mention of AI." But one issue that did appear -- and would show up over and over again in the keynotes, the halls, and the vendor booths -- was digital sovereignty.
Digital sovereignty is the ability of a country, organization, or individual to control its own digital infrastructure, technologies, data, and online processes without undue external dependency on foreign entities or large technology companies. In other words, Europeans are tired of relying on what they see as increasingly unreliable American companies and the US government.
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Carrez explained: "We've seen old alliances between the US and the EU being questioned or leveraged for immediate gains. We have seen the very terms of exchange of goods changing almost every day. And as a response to that, in Europe, we're moving to digital sovereignty." That shift, in turn, means open-source software.
"The world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure," continued Carrez, "that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI, containers and trusted execution environments. Open infrastructure allows nations and organizations to maintain control over their applications, their data, and their destiny while benefiting from global collaboration."
Carrez thinks a better word for what Europe wants is not isolation from the US: "What we're really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience. Resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source," he concluded, "allows us to be sovereign without being isolated."
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OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba echoed the theme of independence rooted in resilience. "From day one, sovereignty played a real role within the development of OVH," he said. A childhood in communist Poland, he explained, instilled a "healthy paranoia" about centralization.
This stance led OVH to build its own hardware, design local legal structures, and set up strong jurisdictional isolation between subsidiaries. "We deliver services with high fiscal and legal isolation that many customers are looking for," said Klaba. "I never believed the global world was sustainable -- my vision was that, eventually, it would be the return of countries and regions."
This approach to sovereignty isn't just about words. In the last year, numerous EU governments have dumped Microsoft software and services for open-source solutions. This movement includes the German state Schleswig-Holstein, which abandoned Exchange and Outlook for open-source programs. Other agencies that have taken the same path away from Microsoft include the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon.
In addition, the European Commission named Henna Virkkunen as its first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024. Her job is to combat the increasingly complex security threats facing the EU, including over-reliance on non-European tech services.
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France's Ministry of Economics and Finance, for example, recently completed NUBO, a cloud-based initiative for sensitive data and services. This OpenStack-based private cloud has been in the works for years. Looking ahead, NUBO is building a Kubernetes-based cloud. Once completed, the French ministry plans to create or contribute to a sovereign Kubernetes distribution.
To make life easier for users -- and to turn a profit, naturally -- many European companies are now offering technology programs to help users achieve digital sovereignty. These programs include Deutsche Telekom, with its Open Telekom Cloud, and OVH, STACKIT, and VanillaCore. Each of these companies relies on OpenStack to power its European-based cloud offerings for individuals, companies, and governments. In addition, other European open-source-based tech businesses, such as SUSE and NextCloud, offer digital sovereignty solutions using other programs.
In conversations at the conference, it became clear that while the changes in American government policy have been worrying Europeans, it's not just politics that has them concerned. People are also upset about Microsoft's 365 price increases. Another tech business issue that's unnerved them is Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and its subsequent massive price increases. This has led to a rise in the use of open-source office software, such as LibreOffice, and its web-based brother, Collabra Online, and the migration of VMware customers to OpenStack-based services.
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The sovereignty issue is not going to go away. As Carrez said in a press conference: "It's extremely top of mind in the EU right now, it's what everyone is just talking about, and it's what everybody is doing." Open source is essential to this movement. As Mike McDonough, head of software product management for Catchengo, a "sovereign by design" cloud company, said: "No one can lock you up; no one can take it away from you, and if someone decides to fork the code, you can continue adopting it anywhere in the world."
All in all, participants agreed that Europe's sovereign cloud movement is reaching critical mass as governments and enterprises move data back from the US-based hyperscalers. European organizations are realizing they need more private infrastructure capacity and local talent to run big cloud initiatives. So, they're turning to open source because, as Carrez concluded, "what makes us resilient is our open-source community."