Digital sovereignty isn't just a buzzword – it's the future

Linux Foundation Europe boss predicts EU will run as fast as it can from US tech companies

Opinion You want to know who's even sicker of President Donald Trump than American liberals? European governments and companies who are realizing that putting all their eggs in one US basket was a stupid move.

That came loud and clear last month in Amsterdam at KubeCon Europe 2026.

In the Netherlands' capital, everyone was talking about digital sovereignty. Heck, there was a sold-out Open Sovereign Cloud Day at the conference's start. It wasn't just there, though. Digital sovereignty was almost as hot a topic at the show as AI. The subject came up in the keynotes, the hallway track, and vendor booths.

Why? In a lunch interview, Thierry Carrez, general manager of Linux Foundation Europe, explained that while technologies like confidential computing can stop cloud providers from reading data by encrypting data in memory, there's no tech answer if the Trump administration insists on an American company flipping the kill switch on your email, your office software, or even access to your US-hosted data.

Carrez stressed that this risk is no longer theoretical. Back in February 2025, Trump had the Department of State impose sanctions on 11 senior members of the International Criminal Court. Microsoft, not wanting to lose billions in US government contracts, folded like a cheap suit.

Many American companies are feeling the heat, so they're setting up plans to assure the EU that they're still trustworthy. Such schemes include Microsoft's EU Data Boundary, AWS European Sovereign Cloud, and Google Cloud Sovereign Cloud.

Europeans aren't buying it. They're becoming increasingly skeptical of US hyperscalers' "sovereign cloud" branding. After all, they cannot realistically promise immunity from American executive orders or from the CLOUD Act.

As Margrethe Vestager, the EU's former competition commissioner, told The Times, it's high time for the EU to break its dependency on America. "If it can happen once that a judge cannot use their email or does not have payment options, then it can happen again... We are so dependent on Chinese and US technology for that infrastructure. It's a dependency, and it can be weaponized against us."

Carrez framed digital sovereignty as a spectrum of resilience, not a yes-or-no state. He said: "No country, including the US, is actually completely digitally sovereign." Carrez noted that chips and components originate from deeply globalized supply chains that no bloc can fully replicate.

Instead of chasing an impossible 100 percent domestic stack, governments and operators are starting to diversify their exposure to reduce dependence on a single origin. Of course, this isn't new. As early as 2004, the German city of Munich moved to a Linux desktop. While the financial hub eventually moved back to Windows after Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich, its government is once more supporting open source.

Today, it's not Windows so much that has Europeans worried as their dependence on Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other US‑based collaboration tools. Carrez said the debate has "moved from tactical to strategic," with ministries now asking for full national usage maps of Gmail, Outlook, and proprietary office suites.

Of course, Windows is part of that discussion. There is growing backlash against Windows 11's locked-in integration with cloud‑connected AI features such as Copilot and file storage services such as OneDrive and Google Drive.

Carrez, a Linux desktop user, doesn't think EU governments are ready quite yet for Linux desktops. He told me the sovereignty conversation is "happening at all levels of the stack," but governments are prioritizing infrastructure and collaboration tools over the end‑user interface. A Linux desktop future for public administrations may still come, he suggested, but only "at the end of that conversation," once resilient, sovereign back‑end services are in place.

At the same time, though, some EU governments are backing or subsidizing domestic, open‑source‑based office platforms. These alternatives to Microsoft 365 and Google Docs, often based on Nextcloud, are rapidly being rolled out. In particular, France, Germany, and Austria are all pursuing their own sovereign productivity stacks. 

That's all well and good, but Carrez lamented that they "need to talk" to avoid a patchwork of incompatible efforts. In parallel, regulators in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany are scrutinizing whether public sector reliance on US suites can ever truly comply with GDPR, further accelerating interest in local or European providers.

The sovereignty debate is also exposing a tech skills gap that cloud convenience helped create. Carrez noted that European universities have spent a decade handing students free credits for US clouds and Microsoft 365 accounts, while quietly de‑emphasizing fundamentals of infrastructure operations. That dependence now bites: public and private organizations seeking to bring workloads home are struggling to hire engineers to build and run local platforms.

Digital sovereignty isn't just an EU issue. While Brussels has made "digital sovereignty" a flagship talking point, Kubecon speakers stressed that the concern is now global. Carrez pointed to Viettel, Vietnam's largest telecom operator, which is part of a top‑down national push to keep critical workloads running on open source software on local infrastructure. Similar moves are underway in South Korea and other countries that sit close to great‑power fault lines and want to avoid Europe's mistake of putting "all their eggs in the US hyperscaler basket."

In the EU, the UK, and other places that now find themselves tied to untrustworthy American technology partners, the move to open source and domestic datacenters and clouds is now a priority. Whether it's just you in your home or you're the CIO of a major company or government agency, you need to partner with reliable open source providers to run an IT stack that you, not Trump, control. ®