US technology companies have put a price on European cloud sovereignty. Research by the European Centre for International Political Economy, commissioned by CCIA Europe, estimates that the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could cost Europe 115 billion euros over the next decade, more than six times the European Commission’s own upper estimate of 18 billion euros. CCIA’s members include Amazon, Google and Meta, the companies with the most to lose if European governments are required to buy European cloud.
The breakdown is 33.3 billion euros of direct public sector costs, plus a further 80 billion euros potentially falling on private companies in banking, healthcare, energy and transport. That larger figure carries the study’s central assumption: it models the Commission extending sovereignty requirements beyond public procurement to cover 25 percent of cloud workloads in essential private sector industries, a power the study locates in the draft’s Article 31. Code rewriting and re architecting account for 69 percent of the estimated costs. Luxembourg takes the largest per worker hit in the model, at 1,711 euros over ten years, followed by Denmark, Austria, Finland and Ireland.
CCIA is urging governments to limit sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads and to replace tests based on corporate origin or personnel nationality with risk based technical safeguards. Neither Amazon nor Google responded to questions about the study.
The conflict of interest does not make the arithmetic wrong, but it defines its use. The same companies warning against mandated sovereignty sell sovereign cloud products of their own, which lets them retain the customer either way. For European policymakers, the study’s real function is to move the debate from principle to cost per worker, terrain where procurement ministries, not digital ministries, decide.