Your Data Lives in America: Why Europe Needs a Sovereign Data Platform

Every organisation runs on data today. That’s nothing new. What is new: our changing relationship with the United States and the fact that it’s becoming increasingly hard to justify having all your data and intelligence sitting on American servers. Europe lacks an independent data platform, and that’s becoming a real problem.

Your competitive advantage, your customer insights, your operational data. All on platforms subject to American legislation, managed by American companies, running on American infrastructure.

And there is no European data platform as an alternative.

That’s what we want to change with DataBaas.

The current landscape

If you have a data team in Europe and you’re looking for a modern data platform that won’t drive your engineers crazy, these are your options:

1. Databricks
2. Snowflake
3. BigQuery

That’s it. Three options. All American.

All running on American hyperscaler infrastructure. All subject to the US CLOUD Act, which gives American authorities the right to request data from American companies, regardless of where that data physically resides.

We usually choose these platforms because they’re very good, but we don’t choose them because we’ve compared European alternatives — because those simply don’t exist.

Pretty strange, really.

Why this matters now

You might think: this has been the case for years, why should I worry now? Didn’t we consider the CLOUD Act when we migrated to Azure?

It matters now because the geopolitical context has fundamentally changed.

American ambassadors in Belgium, France, and Poland are behaving like political activists. They’re openly interfering in domestic politics, attacking ministers on Instagram, and campaigning for allied leaders. Europe expert Marc De Vos called them “Trump’s bulldogs in the culture war against Europe.” US Secretary of State Rubio went to Hungary to campaign for Orbán. A Trump think tank openly advocates for the end of the European Union.

This is the country that has legal authority over your data infrastructure.

The CLOUD Act: it doesn’t matter where your server is

The American CLOUD Act is crystal clear: if a company is American, the US government can access the data. It doesn’t matter if that server is in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or on the moon.

“But we chose an EU region?” Sure. Your data physically resides in Europe. But legally, it’s American. And that makes all the difference.

In June 2025, Microsoft was asked in the French Senate whether they could guarantee that European data would never be requested by American authorities. The answer: Non. They simply cannot make that promise.

The same applies to Google, Amazon, Snowflake, Databricks, and all the other usual suspects. Every American company falls under the same law.

And it’s not just about surveillance. An American president can impose sanctions with a single stroke of the pen, forcing your cloud provider to stop delivering services. Not because they want to, but because they have to. For many companies and teams, this would mean the end of their daily operations. Try migrating from a system you no longer have access to — it’s a lost cause. You’ll have to start from scratch, with all the costs that entails.

It’s worse than you think

Bert Hubert has mapped out our dependency in his Dashboard of American Dependencies. The list is staggering: the RDW, the UWV, all 342 municipalities, the Tax Authority, all major banks, OVPay, all major newspapers and broadcasters. All completely dependent on American clouds.

The Netherlands Court of Audit confirmed: for 67% of the government’s most important cloud services, no risk assessment was made. ABDTopconsult concluded that the Dutch government has become “analogously incompetent.” There is no fallback option left.

Prof. Reijer Passchier, professor of Digitalisation and the Democratic Rule of Law at the Open University, warned: “Digital systems are no longer supporting the government — they are the government. If we hand over control of those systems to foreign tech companies, we undermine democratic oversight.”

For data teams, this is especially relevant

If you work with data and AI, the dependency runs deeper than in the average organisation. Your data platform isn’t just a tool — it’s the nervous system of everything you do. And if you’re doing it right, perhaps even the system on which all strategic decisions within the organisation are made. Every analysis, every model, every pipeline runs on it.

And it’s not just about where data lives. It’s about who has access to it. Who can pull the plug. Who sets the prices. Who controls the roadmap.

On a Databricks or Snowflake, you don’t have a good answer to any of those questions. You’re a user on someone else’s platform, under someone else’s jurisdiction.

Digital sovereignty: how we see data platforms in 2026

Sovereignty is becoming a baseline requirement. The EU Data Act enforces portability. The Cloud Sovereignty Framework sets requirements for sovereign cloud services. In November 2025, the Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty was adopted. The e-Evidence package takes effect in August 2026. The KNAW established that Europe has lost its digital sovereignty. Regulation, geopolitics, and academia all point in the same direction: sovereignty is becoming a baseline requirement for organisations that are part of our critical infrastructure.

Open standards and European cloud are ready. To build a scalable and secure data platform, you no longer need to create dependencies on organisations regulated by the American market and government.

Data Platforms can be cheaper. Modern open data tooling and European clouds are much cheaper than American “Big Data” platforms. 90% of organisations are paying far too much for those platforms. Sovereignty is good for the wallet too.

DataBaas: an independent European data platform

We’re building DataBaas to prove this. A complete and sovereign data platform, from data lake to ML deployment, built on open standards, running on European infrastructure of your choice.

Not because American is inherently bad. But because dependency is. Especially when that dependency is unnecessary.

The question isn’t whether you switch to an independent data platform. The question is when.

Book a demo and discover how you can become independent from American Big Tech.