In this article AMZN Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT
People walk past the logo of Amazon Web Services (AWS) at its exhibitor stall at the India Mobile Congress 2025 at Yashobhoomi, a convention and expo center in New Delhi, India, October 8, 2025. Anushree Fadnavis | Reuters
Amazon 's "sovereign cloud" offering in Europe is a "big bet" for the company, AWS CEO Matt Garman told CNBC as it launched on Thursday, in a move designed to keep it among the leading players in the region amid stringent regulations there for tech giant. The term sovereign cloud broadly relates to cloud computing services where the data is stored, handled and not moved out of a specific jurisdiction. "We think it's a big potential here. We're making a big bet," AWS CEO Matt Garman told CNBC in an exclusive interview. The European Union (EU) has pushed for companies operating in the bloc to be compliant with its various data and privacy regulations, as concerns have risen about the dominance of U.S. tech giants in the cloud space and potential access to European citizens' data. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) European Sovereign Cloud, based in Brandenburg, Germany, and first announced in 2023, is a new concept. Amazon said in a press release on Thursday that the cloud is "physically and logically separate" from other AWS regions. To do this, Amazon has created a new parent company for the sovereign cloud that will be locally controlled in the European Union (EU) and run by EU citizens.
watch now
Garman said that customers wanted more controls around sovereignty before they moved data stored on-premise into the cloud. "And now we're giving them a cloud that doesn't force them to make those trade offs. And we think that that unlocks a huge amount of business," he said. The European Sovereign Cloud includes customer-controlled encryption, for instance, where customers can control the keys to their encryption and so that "that if anyone was even able to get access to [their data], they wouldn't be able to read it," Garman said. "We think that those various levels of protection, both technology protections as well as policy protections, really layer that on and provide a really unique offering that's just different than anything out there today," he added. Stéphane Israël will lead the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Stefan Hoechbauer, who is vice president of AWS global sales for Germany and Europe Central, has been appointed as a managing director. AWS also announced five new members of an advisory board for the sovereign cloud, three of which are Amazon employees. AWS said the sovereign cloud has "no critical dependencies on non-EU infrastructure" and it can continue to operate in the event of a communications disruption with the rest of the world. Under "extreme circumstances, authorised AWS employees of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, who are EU residents, will have independent access to a replica of the source code needed to maintain the AWS European Sovereign Cloud services," the company said. For the past few years, European politicians and regulators have grown concerned about the dominance of U.S. tech firms over critical technology infrastructure. Despite the EU pushing for regional companies to grow their businesses, AWS, Microsoft and Google account for 70% of the cloud computing market in the region, according to Synergy Research Group.