Why Europe is Reconsidering U.S. Clouds

For a while now, Europe has relied heavily on US-based hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These platforms have powered key industries across the continent, from banks, healthcare, transport, to startups. But in these recent years, that dependency is no longer a given. European regulators, enterprises, and even citizens are pushing back. The question is no longer if Europe should rethink its reliance, but how fast it should move, and what alternatives within the continent can realistically fill the gap.

Why the Trust in U.S. Clouds is Eroding

The unease isn’t based on theory. It’s rooted in a series of very real conflicts of interest:

• The Cloud Act vs GDPR: Let’s go back to what some would claim to be the origin of this shift, the CLOUD Act, which was passed in 2018 by President Trump. The U.S. CLOUD Act gives American authorities the right to access data stored by U.S. companies, even if that data is physically hosted in other regions like Europe. That collides head-on with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU’s emphasis on data privacy and sovereignty.
  
  
• Antitrust Investigations: For example, in 2024, the European Commission launched a probe into Microsoft for bundling Teams with Office 365, amid broader concerns about unfair competition and market lock-in.
  
  
• Outages and Reliability Concerns: In recent years, US-based cloud providers like AWS and Azure have experienced outages that have caused huge disruptions to airlines, hospitals, and financial services across Europe. These incidents exposed the fragility of over-centralized and dependent systems.
  
  

The underlying message is that Europe doesn’t want its digital backbone dictated by Washington, D.C., or reliant on single points of corporate control miles away.

Europe’s Push for Data Sovereignty 

Europe’s data answer lies in twofold: build its own sovereign solutions and diversify its infrastructure. This is to fully address three practical interests: resilience, fair competition, and long-term independence.

With this goal in mind, we could see the government giving high preference to compliant region-based data companies. We are already seeing this in motion as local players like OVHcloud, Deutsche Telekom, and Atos are gaining ground, offering alternatives that compete on both compliance and pricing.

This switch could also push interoperability and more standardized data services to the region’s demands. So rather than building another regional hyperscaler clone, it lays the groundwork for a more open cloud ecosystem.

Where GAIMIN Enters the Picture

GAIMIN, while being an European-based company, presents a compelling new direction for Europe's cloud infrastructure, consciously stepping away from the traditional, centralized data center model that has defined hyperscalers. While many local alternatives are simply smaller versions of these US-based giants, GAIMIN has chosen a different path: building a distributed cloud based on a decentralized network powered by thousands of PCs. And here’s why this model is special. 

• Data sovereignty: The compute and storage power needed for data processing remains distributed, reducing exposure to unwarranted access.
• Resilience: A network spread across thousands of independent devices avoids the single-point-of-failure problem, unlike what has been experienced quite often lately.
• Low Latency & Fast Delivery: Since this cloud service is needed in Europe, the resources used by the network are sourced from those based within the region, thereby making service delivery even faster.
• Cost savings: Monopolies from the corporate giants keep driving cloud costs up every day for the average consumer. Our unique business model makes it possible for GAIMIN to provide compute and file-sharing solutions for up to 60% cheaper than hyperscalers.
• Sustainability: Instead of building new mega-data centers, which are expensive for both companies and the clients, GAIMIN reuses what already exists, aligning with Europe’s environmental goals.

Ultimately, GAIMIN's vision is to offer a resilient, cost-effective, and sustainable alternative that complements the existing cloud ecosystem and better aligns with Europe's political, economic, and cultural priorities.

As the EU continues to crank down reliance on overseas cloud services, we could see the monopoly of these providers reduce a lot; Europe’s next decade may not be dominated solely by American giants. Instead, it will be hybrid, with U.S. hyperscalers still being important, and European sovereign clouds like GAIMIN could take a growing share in the Cloud ecosystem.

For enterprises, the takeaway is straightforward: diversify now. For regulators, the call is to keep supporting alternatives like GAIMIN Cloud, which could become the continent’s next-generation digital infrastructure.