America’s technology giants have found a suitably frightening price for Europe’s cloud independence, courtesy of research commissioned by their lobby group.
CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, funded an ECIPE study estimating €115 billion in costs from proposed sovereignty rules. The companies facing a potential loss of business have generously supplied the numbers explaining why customers should stay under the US thumb.
According to Déclic Media, the research includes significant caveats that disappear when the lobbying megaphone is switched on. The €115 billion figure comes from one modelled scenario covering 2027 to 2036, with narrower implementation producing €35.6 billion.
The broader scenario reaches €233 billion, giving campaigners a well-stocked cupboard of alarming figures for whichever minister needs frightening next. The study itself says these scenarios are modelling exercises, with the regulatory outcome still undecided.
The proposed Cloud and AI Development Act would introduce different sovereignty requirements according to the sensitivity of affected cloud workloads. Higher assurance levels could restrict eligible providers and require changes to software dependencies, ownership arrangements and operational control.
Crucially, the €115 billion scenario assumes requirements extend to 25 per cent of the potential private essential-sector cloud base. That assumption generates approximately €80 billion in private-sector exposure, making decisions about the legislation’s reach central to the headline figure.
CCIA Europe policy manager Mitchell Rutledge nevertheless described those spillover costs as “not hypothetical but inevitable” in the association’s announcement.
The medium scenario includes about €33.3 billion in direct public-budget costs, with software migration and rewriting accounting for roughly 69 per cent of the total estimated exposure. CCIA says the Commission’s upper estimate of €18 billion misses substantial adjustment costs.
The study excludes potential benefits from improved security, resilience and strategic autonomy, acknowledging that it provides an incomplete cost-benefit assessment. Europe gets a lovingly itemised departure bill, while the value of escaping dependence remains outside the calculation.
“Businesses cannot simply switch servers; they must redesign software and rewrite code across supply chains,” Rutledge said.
CCIA wants governments to restrict sovereignty requirements to sensitive workloads and replace corporate-origin and personnel-nationality rules with technical safeguards. Its researchers presented their findings to senior officials at a Dublin roundtable alongside the informal telecoms council on 13 October.
