CLOUD Act and data sovereignty: hosting moves to the EU
CLOUD Act, GDPR and data residency are pushing workloads from US clouds to EU hosting. Why jurisdiction now decides where your servers live.
The CLOUD Act lets US authorities demand data from any US-based company no matter where the bytes physically sit — a direct collision with GDPR and a growing reason businesses are moving workloads out of the US cloud entirely. Sovereignty stopped being politics; it is a procurement decision.
What sovereignty buyers check first
- ▹Where the datacentre physically is, and which legal regime governs it.
- ▹Whether the provider can be compelled by an adversary's court order.
- ▹What data the provider holds — and how little of you it ever collected.
- ▹Whether hosting survives the provider's own jurisdiction changing.
EU datacentres, deliberate choice
Two fully physical EU locations — Frankfurt and Helsinki — let you pick the legal environment deliberately: central backbone for reach, Nordic path for redundancy. Spread across jurisdictions with no-KYC signup, the same stack keeps running even as somebody, somewhere, tries to reach the data.