AWS confirms the launch of the European “sovereign cloud” in Germany by 2025 and plans an investment of 7.8 billion euros over 15 years

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing business, has confirmed further details of its European “sovereign cloud”, designed to enable greater data residency in the region.

The company said the first AWS sovereign cloud region would be in the German state of Brandenburg and would be operational by the end of 2025. AWS added that it plans to invest €7.8 billion (8 .5 billion dollars) in the facility until 2040.

The announcement, evidently timed to coincide with the AWS Berlin Summit being held today and tomorrow in the German capital, comes around seven months after AWS first revealed its sovereign cloud plans.

Highly regulated

AWS has long offered localized data storage and processing in the European region, but public sector agencies and organizations operating in some highly regulated industries have been slower to move to the public cloud due to (mis)management issues. data, that is, regardless of Whatever policies and promises a hyperscaler may put in place, the data ultimately remains under the control of an American tech giant. As a result, the AWS European sovereign cloud comes with even broader data controls, allowing all eligible customers to keep all their metadata within the EU – and AWS employees based outside the EU would not be able to access it. nothing contained in the EU.

In other words, the sovereign cloud will be “physically and logically separated” from all other AWS regions.

AWS initially distanced itself from the concept of “sovereign cloud”: Stephen Schmidt, Amazon’s chief security officer (CSO), went so far as to call sovereign cloud “a marketing term more than anything else.” However, in late 2022, AWS announced its “Digital Sovereignty Pledge,” which set its data control commitments in stone.

This change in tactics was partly due to increasing regulatory pressure, but also because its major cloud competitors have supported the sovereign cloud push, including Microsoft, Google and even Oracle, which launched its sovereign cloud for customers of the EU last June. .

Part of its multibillion-dollar investment will include the creation of new roles to support Europe’s sovereign cloud, such as software engineers, systems developers and solutions architects, while also saying it will support “on average 2,800 full-time equivalent jobs in local German companies” each year across its supply chain, covering disciplines such as construction, facilities maintenance and telecommunications.