Originally published on moveinfra.eu .

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which reached general availability in January 2026 in Brandenburg, Germany, offers physical and logical separation from standard AWS regions and is operated exclusively by EU residents. However, it remains a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., a US corporation. For European companies evaluating cloud sovereignty, the core choice comes down to risk tolerance and technical requirements: the AWS European Sovereign Cloud provides strict operational and metadata residency in the EU while preserving access to proprietary AWS services, whereas EU-owned providers (such as UpCloud, Scaleway, OVHcloud, Hetzner, and STACKIT) provide complete legal independence from US extraterritorial laws alongside lower, more predictable infrastructure pricing.

Key takeaways

Data and operational residency vs.…