By Michał Puchała · 2026-06-03 · 3 min read
EU cloud news, week of 2026-06-03
Europe's cloud sovereignty rules are getting concrete: a leaked EU draft could bar US hyperscalers from critical public tenders, MEPs called out Microsoft lobbying in data centre law, the Commission published a sovereignty scoring framework, and SoftBank pledged €75 billion for French AI compute.
The regulatory and infrastructure stories this week share a throughline: Europe is translating sovereignty aspiration into measurable criteria. Two procurement moves landed within days of each other, the Commission published a concrete scoring framework for evaluating cloud providers, and the largest single AI infrastructure commitment the continent has ever attracted arrived alongside questions the new rules are designed to answer.
EU proposes sovereignty criteria that could bar US hyperscalers from critical public tenders A Reuters-sourced draft of the Cloud and AI Development Act, published ahead of Henna Virkkunen's June 3 presentation, sets mandatory non-price criteria for cloud procurement in banking, energy, and healthcare. Providers bidding for these contracts would need to demonstrate EU-developed hardware and software, protection from foreign government access requests, and physical separation from non-EU infrastructure. For regulated European organisations, this signals that the public-sector procurement bar is about to rise - and that the criteria private-sector teams in regulated verticals will eventually face are likely to follow the same logic. The proposal still requires approval from all 27 member states and the European Parliament, so the timeline to enforcement is measured in years, not months.
MEPs accuse Commission of copy-pasting Microsoft lobbying into data centre transparency law Thirty-five MEPs from the Greens and Socialists wrote to the Commission this week after an investigation by Corporate Europe Observatory and AlgorithmWatch found that draft energy-data confidentiality rules were "almost word-for-word identical" to language submitted by Microsoft and lobby group DigitalEurope. The disputed provision would shield individual data centre emissions and energy consumption figures from public disclosure - precisely the data needed to hold rapidly expanding AI infrastructure to account. The episode sits awkwardly alongside the Commission's ambition to triple EU data centre capacity within five to seven years: more infrastructure, less visibility into how it operates.
Commission publishes Cloud Sovereignty Framework with eight measurable criteria Published June 1, this framework is the assessment model the Commission used to award its €180M sovereign cloud tender, won by OVHcloud/CleverCloud, STACKIT, Scaleway, and Proximus/S3NS. It scores providers across eight dimensions: legal jurisdiction, operational control, supply chain transparency, technological openness, security, environmental standards, EU law compliance, and strategic independence. Providers reaching SEAL-3 - OVHcloud, STACKIT, and Scaleway - develop their own technology stack; the SEAL-2 Proximus/S3NS consortium partners with third parties including Mistral. For procurement teams evaluating European cloud providers, this is the most concrete sovereignty scoring system the Commission has produced and a practical starting point for building internal evaluation criteria.
SoftBank commits up to €75 billion and 5 GW of AI compute to France Announced at the Choose France summit on May 30-31, Phase 1 is €45 billion and 3.1 GW by 2031 across three Hauts-de-France sites. The commitment is the largest single AI infrastructure pledge Europe has received, and it landed in the same week the Commission proposed restricting US hyperscalers from critical procurement - a juxtaposition that captures the current tension neatly. Data centres built by a Japanese conglomerate running Nvidia hardware are not the same as European-controlled sovereign compute, even if the capacity is real and the investment welcome. Analysts at TD Cowen have flagged feasibility questions around SoftBank's concurrent US obligations, and the €75 billion figure is a ceiling, not a floor.
The Cloud Sovereignty Framework, the CADA draft, and the SoftBank announcement all point at the same question: Europe has the vocabulary of sovereignty and is building the legal machinery to enforce it - but who actually controls the infrastructure is still being decided.
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