Testimony before the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee
Europe director Max von Thun briefed in a testimony the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee on Europe’s deep dependence on U.S. cloud giants, urging lawmakers to use existing regulatory tools to open the market and ensure Europe can build sovereign, resilient cloud and AI infrastructure.
Three U.S. giants – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – control around 70% of Europe’s cloud infrastructure, compared to just 15% for European providers – a share that has halved since 2017 despite a rapidly growing market. This oligopoly is not the inevitable result of fair competition. It's the product of structural barriers and widespread anti-competitive practices, including bundling and tying, punitive switching costs, contractual lock-ins, steep loyalty discounts, and the cross-subsidisation of cloud infrastructure with profits from other markets. The result? Almost no customer switching, very little multi-cloud adoption, and a European ecosystem that cannot scale — no matter how innovative or affordable its technology may be. This market concentration isn't just an economic issue. Cloud technology has become essential infrastructure for everything from our hospitals and banks to our airports and armies. Yet outages at a single hyperscaler can now disrupt commerce and communications across the continent, and transatlantic tensions have made Europe's extreme dependence on U.S. cloud providers a strategic liability.