In January 2026, 45 UK MPs submitted an Early Day Movement entitled “UK digital sovereignty technique”. The movement pointed to the dependency of presidency companies, democratic features and significant infrastructure on a small variety of digital suppliers.
These suppliers are US-based hyperscaler cloud suppliers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, often known as the Massive Three, who between them present cloud companies to greater than 90% of UK public sector organisations.
In the meantime, in October 2025, the European Individuals’s Get together group within the European Parliament adopted a place paper calling for, “a everlasting EU Tech Discussion board to information digital technique [and] construct sovereign European digital infrastructure for cloud, AI and knowledge – free from overseas management”.
This got here forward of a summit on European digital sovereignty that occurred in November in Berlin and gathered greater than 900 policymakers, trade leaders, traders, researchers and civil society representatives from 27 EU member states.
On the occasion, German chancellor Friedrich Merz mentioned: “For Europe, digital sovereignty means the flexibility to form expertise throughout all the worth chain according to European pursuits and desires. We search competitors on equal phrases.”
These are just a few examples of initiatives geared toward wresting again some management and knowledge sovereignty within the UK and Europe towards a backdrop of overwhelming dominance by US hyperscalers of private and non-private sector infrastructure.
On this article, we take a look at European lawmakers’ makes an attempt to drive in direction of better digital sovereignty, how that overlaps with opposition to anti-competitive practices available in the market, and why governments want to consider encouraging residence grown tech – or else threat shedding it.
Digital sovereignty: Taking again management
The UK digital sovereignty technique Early Day Movement was sponsored by MPs from events that included the Greens, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and quite a few independents.
The primary a part of the movement learn: “That this home notes that authorities companies, democratic features and significant infrastructure more and more rely upon a small variety of exterior digital suppliers; additional notes that extreme focus and insufficient exit or substitution planning expose the general public sector to dangers together with service withdrawal, sanctions, business failure, geopolitical disruption and unilateral adjustments in service phrases.”
It went on to say it believed “long-term resilience, continuity of public companies and worth for cash require the federal government to retain efficient management over digital techniques it funds or depends on” and to “assist UK expertise corporations and SMEs, and improve the proportion of public digital expenditure retained within the UK financial system”.
It capped this with a name to, “publish a complete UK digital sovereignty technique with binding impact throughout central authorities, arm’s-length our bodies and the broader public sector”.
A scarcity of digital sovereignty? The UK public sector instance
As we noticed within the earlier article on this collection, US hyperscaler clouds are deeply embedded within the UK public sector.
Within the monetary yr 2023/2024, 95% of central and native public sector organisations within the UK spent funds on hyperscale cloud companies. In terms of spending on companies corresponding to software program as a service (SaaS) that depend on hyperscaler cloud, that proportion expands to 99%.
That is taken from knowledge gathered by Tussell and Laptop Weekly that covers greater than 1,100 central and native authorities organisations that vary from ministries to councils and all kinds of different companies.
Out of twenty-two authorities departments within the knowledge, 21 spent funds on hyperscale cloud in some kind in that yr, and 13 spent 50% or extra of their tech funds on hyperscale cloud immediately or through cloud resellers.
The highest 5 public sector spenders on hyperscale cloud had been: Ministry of Defence (£1.09bn), HM Income & Customs (£1.01bn), the House Workplace (£775m), Division for Work and Pensions (£622m), and NHS England (£442m).
Digital sovereignty: UK authorities lacks a definition
In the meantime, at ministry degree – specifically the Division for Science, Innovation and Know-how (DSIT) – the UK lacks a transparent definition of knowledge sovereignty from which to work.
It informed Laptop Weekly in a request for remark in February 2026: “It is a advanced and evolving coverage space, fairly than a particular challenge. It requires partaking with departments throughout authorities – a course of which is ongoing.”
The DSIT couldn’t give a timescale for the method, however mentioned: “Work continues throughout authorities to make sure a constant strategy, and we could have extra to say in the end. There isn’t any single, globally agreed definition of digital sovereignty. Worldwide approaches range and are formed by home coverage goals.
“Nonetheless, UK public sector expertise consumers already function inside a powerful framework of safeguards, for instance: knowledge safety regulation, UK safety requirements, the Cloud First coverage and established business guidelines. These mix to assist successfully defend public companies.”
Liberal Democrat spokesperson for science, innovation and expertise Tim Clement-Jones believes this lack of definition serves a objective – specifically, that the DSIT doesn’t must grapple successfully with regulation across the challenge.
“They’re superb at missing definitions, as a result of it signifies that they don’t have to control them. That’s the entire thought,” he says. “After we did our AI and defence paper, they didn’t have a definition of a deadly autonomous weapon. And we thought, ‘That is peculiar. This stuff are harmful; there’s excessive threat’, however they couldn’t provide you with one. And so they mentioned, ‘NATO doesn’t have a definition both’.”
The place knowledge sovereignty meets anti-trust
Nicky Stewart, senior adviser with the Open Cloud Coalition, believes UK public sector procurement is held in a stranglehold by AWS and Microsoft, and that that is anti-competitive and to the detriment of UK firms. The price to these organisations that procure cloud companies, and by extension the UK taxpayer, is as much as £500m per yr, she says.
She believes UK public sector procurement has moved from a “public cloud first” coverage to one in all “hyperscaler cloud first” and that direct awards ensuing from this have tended to lock public sector our bodies into the US giants.
Stewart says: “They got here up with the G-Cloud framework, the place primarily cloud suppliers who aspired to offer to authorities may showcase their wares. It operated as a listing. The customer went in with a listing of their necessities and it might spit out a listing of suppliers and their companies. They put that right down to a brief checklist after which they immediately awarded it. There was no aggressive course of, no negotiation round costs, nothing.”
Initially, she says, that concerned comparatively small direct award contracts: “However after they began transferring to hyperscale public cloud, the dimensions of these direct awards bought greater and larger. A few of these contracts had been tons of of thousands and thousands in direct award despite the fact that the Crown Business Providers’ personal steerage says they need to be for low worth or pressing transactions.”
Some contracts had been tons of of thousands and thousands in direct award despite the fact that the Crown Business Providers’ personal steerage says they need to be for low worth or pressing transactions Nicky Stewart, Open Cloud Coalition
Then, says Stewart, got here “dedicated spend” agreements – corresponding to with AWS for a number of thousands and thousands of kilos – and into which authorities departments turned much more tightly locked. In the meantime, she says, UK suppliers are shut out by excessive entry necessities to frameworks corresponding to G-Cloud.
“The general public sector has bought itself locked in into the 2 dominant cloud suppliers,” says Stewart. “And when you’re locked in, there’s an entire chain of issues you could take into consideration. It’s not only a case of ‘I need to change cloud suppliers’ or ‘I need to diversify my cloud suppliers’. You must take into consideration the talents to modify or diversify and the uncertainty about how a lot it can price.”
All of this hasn’t escaped the discover of the UK authorities’s Competitors and Markets Authority (CMA), which was set to report on the finish of March on doable measures towards AWS and Microsoft. In a report printed in July 2025, it discovered these firms to be the 2 largest suppliers in a “extremely concentrated” market and that this had adversarial results on competitors.
The CMA is about to determine whether or not to use strategic market standing (SMS) in relation to AWS and Microsoft’s actions in cloud companies. SMS would permit the CMA to “impose focused and bespoke interventions to handle … issues … recognized”.
It’s but to be seen what the impact of these measures might be.
European responses to dangers round knowledge sovereignty
Europe has been just a little extra ahead in formulating responses to issues over knowledge sovereignty, and particularly with regard to the overwhelming market dominance of the US hyperscalers. There have been initiatives to construct a point of residence grown cloud tech. Europe is rather less depending on US hyperscalers than the UK, so it’s doable it has made a dent.
Initiatives embrace:
The European Gaia-X challenge to develop a safe European knowledge infrastructure, though this seems largely stalled.
France’s SecNumCloud, a high-level safety certification for cloud service suppliers geared toward provision of trusted, sovereign internet hosting by defending towards non-EU authorized, technical and cyber safety dangers.
France’s Cloud de confiance, a government-backed initiative to offer safe, sovereign cloud computing companies that defend delicate knowledge from overseas surveillance.
The economic-focussed IPCEI-CIS, through which round 100 firms and institutes from 12 EU international locations are cooperating on growing new knowledge and cloud options.
What do campaigners name for: Axel’s axis in Europe
Axel Voss MEP of the European Individuals’s Get together has been a vocal advocate of constructing European digital sovereignty. He needs to chop pink tape and create a preferential surroundings for European suppliers. Voss believes European sovereign digital functionality means strengthening European suppliers and making it simpler for European private and non-private sector organisations to make use of them.
He says: “It’s not autarky or protectionism, it’s Europe having the ability to take unbiased choices in regards to the parameters of digital applied sciences, backed by actual European choices in cloud, AI and knowledge; open requirements and interoperability; and procurement that builds a resilient European provider base.
“Virtually, which means pilots that mix European compute and knowledge areas, ‘EU-by-default’ instruments in establishments, and funding and scale mechanisms to make European suppliers aggressive.”
For Voss, a key matter can also be to take away obstacles to European digital innovation: “Our fundamental obstacles are fragmentation and sluggish, bureaucratic decision-making. That’s why I push measures like chopping actual pink tape, strengthening funding/VC and strategic capabilities (cloud/AI/edge/cyber/chips), and utilizing procurement and open requirements to interrupt lock-ins.”
Develop native functionality or die?
Nicky Stewart of the Open Cloud Coalition needs to decrease boundaries to UK cloud suppliers, after years of them being sidelined whereas UK public sector procurement resulted within the hyperscalers turning into entrenched.
“There are extra UK cloud suppliers than I can rely on my palms and ft,” she says. “A few of them can function at scale – not essentially the identical scale because the hyperscale cloud suppliers, however they’ve totally different choices. There’s all the time going to be a spot for hyperscale and there are particular workloads which can be suited to that form of scale.
“However there are different workloads with totally different necessities. Perhaps they’re extra steady, for instance, not peaking and spiking. Or they could have actually excessive safety necessities, or sovereign options, or can provide higher worth for cash, or way more private customer support.
“The purpose right here is that if the UK public sector authorities doesn’t give the correct alerts to its personal cloud internet hosting trade, how on earth does it count on to develop any native functionality?”
