et according to independent ICT expert Bert Hubert, such initiatives, while admirable, represent little more than digital window dressing.

“These are quite suitable if you’re a pigeon racing association and want to put your pigeon racing association website there,” he said. “But if you come along saying, ‘I’m Rabobank and I want to outsource my banking operations to you’, you’re not going to engage with a hosting provider that says, ‘We have an offer for €5 per month’.”

The harsh assessment reflects a broader reality facing Europe’s digital sovereignty ambitions: the chasm between political rhetoric and technological capability has never been wider.

As American cloud providers such as AWS announce new European entities claiming sovereign operations, the question becomes whether Europe’s homegrown alternatives can ever bridge the gap between aspiration and enterprise-grade reality.

Sovereignty is the absence of strong dependencies on third parties. The Sovereign Cloud from AWS is a misnomer here.