Can Europe’s tech firms really replace Amazon, Google and Microsoft?
MEPs want public bodies to buy more European cloud services. The continent’s alternatives are growing, but they remain a fraction of the size of Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Europe's tech firms struggle to replace Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as a recent global outage highlighted the continent's heavy reliance on a few American tech companies. Microsoft Outlook and Teams users worldwide experienced service disruptions, affecting 74 countries and territories. While Microsoft has not named a root cause, the outage follows similar disruptions in January and August.
European cloud providers hold only about 15% of the market, down from 29% in 2017, with German companies SAP and Deutsche Telekom each holding just 2%. Most EU citizens desire European-controlled digital infrastructure, with support highest in Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Brussels aims to boost the EU's data center capacity and AI "gigafactories" to challenge the American giants.
However, Europe lacks a single rival to the tech titans, instead having contenders at various stages of the technology stack. Most European countries are willing to pay more for an EU-based provider, but businesses remain cautious due to the high dependency on US cloud providers. Microsoft plans to publish a report on the cause of the outage after services are fully restored.
Written by urgent.news from Euronews's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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