The European Commission has awarded a €180 million cloud services contract to four European providers, in a move that sets a clear direction for how the bloc intends to manage its critical digital infrastructure. The question now is whether the network layer keeping that infrastructure connected can match the ambition.
The contract is the latest in a series of EU-level procurement decisions aimed at reducing dependence on US hyperscalers for sensitive public sector workloads. By contracting with European providers, the Commission is acting on the digital sovereignty principles that have shaped EU technology policy for several years.
Tony O'Sullivan, CEO of RETN, one of the largest independent internet backbone operators with a network spanning more than forty countries, argues that data residency alone does not constitute sovereignty. The argument is essentially an infrastructure one: where data sits matters, but where traffic travels to reach it matters equally.
True sovereignty doesn't stop at where data is stored. It requires not only cloud infrastructure, but the routes between data centres, countries, and users to be equally as resilient and independent. That's where sovereignty is tested day to day, not just in policy, but in how traffic actually flows. Without that, the picture is only half complete.
The practical constraint O'Sullivan identifies is scaling pressure on the backbone. As AI advances and more European digital traffic is routed within the bloc rather than via transatlantic links, the volume of data movement between European data centres, countries, and users will increase sharply. If that layer is not scaled and coordinated to absorb the load, it becomes a bottleneck regardless of where cloud capacity sits.
The debate around European digital sovereignty has tended to focus on compute and storage: where servers are located, which jurisdiction governs the data, which companies hold the contracts. O'Sullivan's framing extends that conversation to the network routing layer, an area that has received less policy attention but which determines the day-to-day performance and resilience of any sovereign cloud arrangement.
RETN operates infrastructure across Europe and into Asia and the Middle East. O'Sullivan is available for further comment on the connectivity dimensions of European cloud policy.
