The hyperscaler

There is a slightly uncomfortable question hiding behind the growing market for sovereign cloud. What happens when the sovereign cloud is built on top of a hyperscaler?

The question is no longer theoretical. Across Europe, the Gulf and other regions that are trying to strengthen their digital sovereignty, we increasingly see architectures that combine local infrastructure and governance with technology provided by companies such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google. It is not difficult to understand why.

There is little point in pretending that every country needs to build its own version of Azure or AWS from scratch. Hyperscalers have spent decades and enormous amounts of capital building infrastructure, software platforms, security capabilities and global service ecosystems that are extraordinarily difficult to reproduce. Even countries with substantial resources would find it difficult to recreate that entire technology stack simply for the sake of being able to call it local.…