News in Cloud Computing & Data Storage

CBRE: AI demand drives record Europe data centre signings

Demand for AI-ready data centre capacity is increasing across Europe, with emerging AI infrastructure providers, often referred to as neoclouds, securing record levels of capacity. According to research from global commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE, signings for AI-focused colocation capacity reached 420MW in the first half of 2026, compared with 89MW during the same period in 2025. Two thirds (66%) of the contracted capacity is expected to be delivered by data centre operators to neoclouds in the Nordic region, where lower-cost renewable power is more readily available. The increase in AI-related capacity signings indicates growing confidence amongst data centre operators and investors in the neocloud sector. CBRE says operators are finding ways to meet funding requirements when contracting with neoclouds, representing a shift from the more cautious investment environment seen two years ago. Operators have also adopted measures such as rental deposits and letters of credit on some transactions to reduce financial risk. Neoclouds secure capacity for AI workloads Andrew Jay, Head of Data Centre Solutions, Europe at CBRE, explains, “Neoclouds have emerged as viable occupiers who are taking capacity at scale in markets typically where lower-cost power is the norm. "It is a sign that many data centre providers are increasingly comfortable with the ambitions of neocloud providers and the financial structures that can be used to satisfy the funders.” Kevin Restivo, Director, European Data Centre Research at CBRE, adds, “The underlying demand for compute is immense. Several neocloud companies have emerged with investment-grade customers, enabling them to secure capacity and support the growing requirements of AI workloads. “As a result, we are seeing unprecedented growth in this segment with deployments in areas in parts of Europe where data centre development isn’t the norm.” For more from CBRE, click here.

Macquarie, Microsoft sign A$278m data centre deal

Macquarie Cloud Services, an Australian cloud services provider for business and government, part of Macquarie Technology Group, has signed a Microsoft Datacentre Optimisation (DCO) agreement covering Azure consumption over the next three years. The agreement is the third DCO agreement signed by Macquarie and builds on its work with Microsoft supporting Australian organisations with cloud migration and infrastructure modernisation. Under the agreement, Microsoft forecasts that Macquarie's Azure consumption spend could reach up to A$278 million (£145 million) over three years, based on its roadmap and performance to date. Microsoft DCO is an initiative intended to support partners in expanding their Azure practices and helping customers with hybrid cloud transformation. Macquarie Cloud Services is a Microsoft cloud service provider (CSP) in Australia and has used the DCO programme to support customer workload migration. Azure demand grows in Australia The agreement comes as Australia's public cloud market is forecast to reach around A$220 billion (£114 billion) by 2034, according to Macquarie. The company attributes the expected growth to AI, cyber security, systems modernisation, and regulatory requirements affecting major industries, which include APRA's CPS 230 and CPS 234 standards, the Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act, and Essential Eight (E8) maturity requirements. Vincent Texcier, Global DCO Centre of Excellence at Microsoft, comments, “Macquarie Cloud Services continues to demonstrate strong leadership in helping Australian organisations modernise with Microsoft Azure. “Through this agreement, Macquarie Cloud Services can continue helping customers migrate and modernise infrastructure, strengthen their cloud foundations, and prepare for future data and AI opportunities.” Macquarie has held Microsoft's Expert MSP status for six years. The company says it has delivered average cloud cost savings of 26% and reduced operational risk for thousands of Australian organisations. Naran McClung (pictured above), Executive Head of Azure at Macquarie Cloud Services, notes, “By combining our capabilities with the DCO framework, we are enabling customers to move to Azure at scale, while building a foundation for data, AI, and next-generation applications that will ultimately drive the Australian economy. “Increasingly, our growth is being driven by customers expanding into new workloads and more sophisticated capabilities as their cloud maturity develops, as well as organisations moving to Azure for the first time. "This agreement reflects continued confidence in our Azure capability, experience, and customer outcomes. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Microsoft as it continues its own significant investment into Australia.” For more from Macquarie, click here.

Vultr scales AI infrastructure with new AMD GPUs

Vultr, a privately held cloud infrastructure company, has announced plans to offer the AMD Instinct MI455X GPU, alongside support for the AMD Helios rack-scale architecture, with pre-orders now open ahead of availability in Q4. The cloud infrastructure provider says the platform is designed for AI training, inference, fine tuning, agentic AI, and high-performance computing (HPC). According to the company, the infrastructure is intended to support organisations moving AI workloads from development into production, particularly those requiring high-memory, rack-scale computing. J.J. Kardwell, CEO of Vultr, comments, "Customers are rapidly moving from AI experimentation into production and, increasingly, that means agentic and inference-heavy workloads that require infrastructure built for scale. "The AMD Instinct MI455X and Helios rack-scale architectures give our customers the flexibility, control, and price-to-performance they need to scale their AI initiatives. Making this architecture available across Vultr's global infrastructure enables teams to build and deploy without constraints." AI infrastructure targets large-scale workloads The AMD Instinct MI455X GPU is based on AMD's CDNA architecture and features HBM4 memory, increased memory bandwidth, and support for low-precision AI data types. The Helios rack-scale architecture supports up to 72 GPUs in a single deployment. Vultr says the platform will also support direct liquid cooling to improve thermal management and energy efficiency in higher-density deployments. The infrastructure is complemented by AMD's ROCm software platform and Pensando networking technology, which are designed to improve AI training, inference performance, and scalability. IDC forecasts a tenfold increase in the number and complexity of enterprise AI agents over the next five years, increasing demand for computing infrastructure capable of supporting repeated inference workloads. Dave McCarthy, Group Vice President, Cloud and Datacenter Infrastructure at IDC, notes, "As enterprises transition into the agentic era, the massive influx of complex, data-intensive workflows requires a fundamental shift in infrastructure design. "Vultr's deployment of the AMD Instinct MI455X GPU provides the massive memory capacity and rack-scale efficiency necessary to support the continuous inference loops that define next-generation AI workloads." Vultr says reserved capacity for deployments based on the AMD Instinct MI455X GPU and AMD Helios architectures is now available for pre-order, with deployments planned from 2027 through to 2028. For more from Vultr, click here.

Sharon AI signs $373m cloud agreement

Sharon AI, an Australian neocloud provider, has signed a five-year cloud computing agreement with a global artificial intelligence platform worth $373 million (£277 million). Under the agreement, Sharon AI expects to deploy cloud computing infrastructure across its AI facilities in Australia, with revenue expected to begin in the first quarter of 2027. The company says its total AI factory capacity remains at 132MW, with 120MW now contracted to end customers. It also plans to increase the number of NVIDIA GPUs across its AI factory platform from 62,000 to 64,000 by mid-2027. The initial deployment under the agreement is expected to use 2,048 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs. Further deployments may take place during the five-year agreement, subject to customer requirements and the contract terms. An expansion of Australian AI infrastructure capacity Sharon AI says the agreement will contribute to the expansion of AI compute capacity in Australia and support the development of domestic AI infrastructure. James Manning, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sharon AI, comments, "This agreement represents an important milestone in the continued expansion of Sharon AI's customer base and contracted AI infrastructure capacity. "As organisations increasingly seek access to sovereign, high-performance AI compute, we remain focused on delivering scalable infrastructure that supports the evolving needs of AI platforms, enterprises, and governments. "We continue to see strong demand for AI infrastructure in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region, and this agreement reflects our strategy of securing long-term customer commitments as we expand our AI factory platform." The company has said the agreement is also expected to support investment in Australian digital infrastructure and provide additional opportunities for businesses, researchers, and government organisations to access AI compute capacity domestically.

Airbus selects Scaleway for sovereign cloud

European multinational aerospace company Airbus has selected French cloud computing provider Scaleway as a sovereign cloud provider to support parts of its cloud infrastructure, adding European-based cloud services to its existing multi-cloud strategy. Under the agreement, Scaleway will provide cloud infrastructure for selected enterprise applications operating in environments requiring high levels of governance, resilience, and legal protection. The platform is also intended to support AI-enabled workloads. Airbus says the appointment follows a competitive tender process that assessed cloud providers on technical capabilities, operational resilience, and legal and governance safeguards, including European jurisdiction and data protection. The sovereign cloud platform will be built on European infrastructure and integrated with Airbus's existing technology environment. According to the companies, it is designed to support business-critical applications across aircraft design, engineering, manufacturing, and enterprise operations. The agreement forms part of Airbus's wider digital sovereignty strategy, allowing different workloads to be hosted in environments that best meet their technical, operational, and regulatory requirements. Supporting critical applications with European cloud infrastructure Scaleway says the platform will provide interoperability with Airbus's existing cloud estate whilst enabling the company to retain operational control over sensitive applications and industrial data. Damien Lucas, Chief Executive Officer of Scaleway, comments, "Artificial intelligence is redefining how the world's most advanced industries design, manufacture, and operate. Unlocking its full potential requires digital infrastructure that combines world-class performance with trust, openness, and long-term control. "We're proud that Airbus has selected Scaleway to help build this next chapter of its cloud strategy and to demonstrate that Europe can deliver sovereign cloud capabilities at the highest international standards." Catherine Jestin, Executive Vice President Digital at Airbus, adds, "This collaboration marks a significant milestone in our broader commitment to European digital sovereignty. "By integrating a trusted, high-performance cloud environment that keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws, we are ensuring that our digital infrastructure keeps pace with our aerospace innovation while maintaining control and resilience of our industrial operations." For more from Scaleway, click here.

GigaCloud, Cubbit partner on sovereign cloud storage

GigaCloud, a Ukrainian cloud services provider, and Cubbit, an Italian provider of geo-distributed cloud storage infrastructure, have formed a partnership to provide sovereign, geo-distributed cloud storage services for organisations in Ukraine and Poland. Organisations in the two countries currently face an increasingly demanding risk landscape, where ransomware and cyberattacks remain a persistent threat. Armed conflicts make data centre facilities extremely susceptible to physical disruptions. Throughout recent years, missile strikes and attacks on critical infrastructure have demonstrated that no single site can be considered safe. If a facility goes offline, organisations lose access to critical systems and productivity halts. At the same time, companies must comply with an ever-stricter legislative framework - from GDPR to regional laws - whilst keeping sensitive and strategic data under their direct control, operated within defined geographic boundaries. For enterprises, government institutions, and critical infrastructure operators, storage that is resilient, sovereign, and distributed across multiple trusted cross-country sites has become a requirement. As such, the agreement will see GigaCloud deploy Cubbit's software-defined object storage platform, DS3 Composer, across five data centres in Kyiv, Lviv, and Warsaw. The companies say the platform is intended to improve resilience whilst helping organisations meet data sovereignty and regulatory requirements. The storage platform encrypts, fragments, and distributes data across multiple locations, allowing organisations to define where their data is stored, including within Ukraine, within Poland, or across both countries. The service also provides S3-compatible object storage for applications including backup, disaster recovery, long-term archiving, and management of unstructured data. Supporting data resilience across multiple locations Stefano Onofri, co-CEO and co-founder of Cubbit, says, "We are proud to bring our technology to Ukraine and support the country at a moment when the resilience of digital infrastructure has never mattered more. "GigaCloud is firmly rooted in the local market - trusted by government institutions and critical infrastructure operators - and brings deep technical expertise. "Together, we are giving Ukrainian and Polish organisations something new to these regions: a geo-distributed storage infrastructure that keeps strategic data protected and always available, distributed across multiple trusted countries by design, so that even in the most demanding conditions, data remains online and in the hands of those who own it." The service will target mid-sized and enterprise organisations, including government, defence, financial services, media, retail, and IT sectors, where resilient data storage and rapid recovery are operational priorities. Nazariy Kurochko (pictured above), CEO of GigaCloud, explains, "Cloud infrastructure in our region can’t be built around assumptions borrowed from calmer markets. Our businesses have learned to think differently: to plan for uncertainty, to value control, and to choose architectures that remain dependable when circumstances change. "This partnership with Cubbit helps us turn that experience into a practical storage model for organisations that need not just capacity, but confidence. For us, it is also a step towards strengthening a European cloud ecosystem where resilience, sovereignty, and a technology-agnostic approach are built into the foundation." For more from Cubbit, click here.

DeepInfra opens its first international AI data centre

DeepInfra, a US cloud platform providing inference infrastructure for AI, has opened a new data centre in Toronto, Canada, marking the company's first facility outside the US as it expands its AI inference infrastructure. The 1.7MW site is DeepInfra's ninth data centre and will host more than 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. The company says the expansion increases its AI inference capacity whilst supporting lower-latency services for customers across North America and other international markets. Supporting growing AI inference demand According to research from McKinsey & Company, AI inference is expected to account for more than 40% of total data centre demand by 2030. The growth is being driven by organisations moving AI models into production, increasing demand for GPU infrastructure capable of supporting real-time applications, AI agents, and high-volume API traffic. DeepInfra says the Toronto deployment forms part of its wider infrastructure strategy as demand for AI inference continues to grow. Nikola Borisov, CEO and co-founder of DeepInfra, notes, "Enterprises are moving from experimentation to production at unprecedented speed, and that shift demands infrastructure that is both scalable and globally distributed. "This Toronto cluster is a foundational step in expanding our capacity beyond the US and ensuring customers can run AI workloads closer to where their users and data reside." The Toronto facility follows DeepInfra's 'Series B' funding round and forms part of the company's plans to increase AI inference capacity in strategically selected regions. Additional international deployments are also being evaluated as demand for GPU-intensive AI workloads continues to increase.

Addressing enterprise storage's biggest challenges

In this article for DCNN, Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat, explores how enterprise storage platforms can help organisations strengthen cyber resilience, support AI adoption, simplify operations, and manage growing data volumes more efficiently: IDC's research highlights how enterprises can tackle five key challenges The most successful organisations aren't the ones that avoid challenges; they're the ones that directly confront them. Whether it's improving cyber resilience, managing data growth, reducing operational complexity, or navigating the demands of AI investment, enterprise leaders that ignore challenges won’t see them disappear. Instead, they need to identify a technology partner capable of tackling them together. The IDC Business Value Snapshot, ‘The Business Value of Infinidat InfiniBox Solutions’, provides a very useful lens through which to examine how Infinidat supports enterprises to realise their business goals. In part, this is achieved through overcoming the five major challenges facing IT and enterprise storage teams, as this article highlights. IDC's research, based on interviews with Infinidat Global Fortune 500 and very large enterprise customers, describes how Infinidat provides a blueprint for doing exactly this, with significant improvements quantified across operational efficiency, complexity, integration, cyber resilience, downtime, and operating costs. Importantly, the study highlights the value of a storage platform that goes beyond storing data to one that’s designed to help enterprises navigate the realities of modern IT. Supporting AI initiatives without increasing infrastructure overheads AI has exploded in use and many research papers highlight how widely adopted it is. A 2025 study by Deloitte found that 85% of organisations increased their AI investment in the previous 12 months, and 91% plan to increase levels of investment again. McKinsey's State of AI in 2025 report corroborates this, finding that 88% of organisations are using AI tools in at least one business function. All these projects come with significantly increased demands on storage and data teams, which also needs to be financed, unless appropriate technology is in place. Data-intensive AI and analytics applications are forcing IT departments to reconsider legacy architectures to ensure their storage infrastructure can meet rapidly evolving requirements for high performance, availability, scalability, and data accessibility. IDC’s study found that Infinidat significantly reduced storage expenses via its high-density architecture and efficient data reduction, whilst delivering powerful, real-world application performance. This means IT teams are freed up to focus on AI projects rather than infrastructure management. Strengthening cyber resilience and reducing downtime Cyberattacks are now so prevalent that enterprises must realise the question is not if your enterprise will suffer a cyberattack, but when and how often. The latest data suggests an average enterprise is suffering over 2,000 cyberattacks per week, which is an incredible number. Cybersecurity has become such a hyper-critical issue that it’s a top concern across the whole of the C-Suite - and it’s not going away. In fact, the inevitability of cyberattacks means enterprises are now being judged on speed of recovery and post-service availability. This means having ultra-reliable storage that underpins enterprise cyber resilience and business continuity objectives is essential. IDC’s study reported that users of InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA benefit from this, with the backing of InfiniSafe cyber storage which provides guarantees for data recovery and restoration within a minute in the event of a cyberattack, regardless of dataset size. Infinidat's capabilities include ransomware detection, immutable snapshots, logical air-gapping, and automated cyber protection mechanisms as standard. Reducing operational complexity Too many enterprises are managing fragmented, multi-platform environments which result in significant administration and management inefficiencies. In fact, storage simplification is a key driver of value. The IDC report found that organisations using InfiniBox were achieving this, with enterprises reporting less staff time for storage management activities and over 50% greater storage administration team efficiency, highlighting the clear business value of simplifying storage operations and reducing management complexity. Managing data growth within budget constraints As stored data volumes continue to grow, enterprises face increasing pressure to expand storage capacity without matching increases in budget. IDC found that enterprises using InfiniBox were able to achieve this goal, with an average of 51% annual cost reduction and 58% lower operational costs. These improvements were driven by Infinidat’s high-density architecture, advanced data reduction technologies, and lower infrastructure overheads. The result is a storage platform that helps enterprises absorb their data growth more efficiently while controlling operational and capital expenditure. Delivering more against resource and skills constraints This final challenge is far from new, but it remains one of the defining characteristics of today’s IT department. At a time when enterprise technology spending overall continues to rise exponentially, CIOs and IT leaders face increasing pressure to deliver greater business value without corresponding increases in departmental resources or headcount. IDC's report highlights that Infinidat helps enterprises achieve this balance through a combination of simplified management, reduced operational overhead, and improved infrastructure efficiency. The IDC study highlights productivity improvements, lower management effort, and the ability for smaller teams to manage larger environments effectively. This enables IT departments to maintain high service levels while focusing their resources on strategic initiatives like AI innovation rather than routine administration. In short, Infinidat’s easier-to-manage ‘set it and forget it’ infrastructure helps them to do more with the resources they already have. Overall, IDC's research shows us that the greatest value enterprises derive from their enterprise storage is not based solely on performance metrics, capacity figures, or technical specifications. These are still important, of course, but the greatest benefits reported by InfiniBox users were strategic outcomes that directly impact business performance. IT professionals must contend with constantly growing data volumes, tougher cyber resilience requirements, expensive AI initiatives, and ongoing general pressure on resources. The question is no longer simply whether the storage solution can perform well, but how well it can help the business operate more effectively. For more from Infinidat, click here.

Kaytus launches all-QLC flash storage solution

Kaytus, a manufacturer of servers, storage systems, and data centre infrastructure hardware, has unveiled its All-QLC Flash Storage Solution at AI EXPO KOREA 2026, a platform engineered for ultra-large-scale AI training across clusters of 10,000-plus GPUs. As model sizes and agentic-AI workloads surge, Kaytus argues that the real bottleneck in modern AI infrastructure is no longer raw compute, but the storage layer feeding data to accelerators fast enough to keep them fully utilised. Built on an all-QLC flash architecture, the solution is designed to deliver the sustained throughput and high-density capacity that hyperscale AI clusters demand - reducing GPU idle time and improving overall training efficiency. Purpose-built for over 10,000 GPU clusters, the new architecture targets storage - not compute - as the decisive constraint on AI scale. The launch signals a broader shift in AI-era infrastructure priorities, placing high-performance storage at the centre of the conversation around scaling AI.

What European data sovereignty means for data centre tools

In this exclusive article for DCNN, Swiss privacy technology company Proton Mail examines why evolving European data sovereignty requirements are forcing data centre operators to reassess the tools they use to manage infrastructure, store operational data, and demonstrate regulatory compliance: Data sovereignty moves into the data centre For most data centre teams, the concept of data sovereignty has lived at a comfortable arm's length. It was something legal worried about, something the sales team put in proposals, something that got mentioned at vendor briefings before the coffee break. But that distance is collapsing, and fast. The European Union's regulatory architecture around data has shifted from a set of compliance checkboxes into something far more structural. GDPR established the foundations; the EU Data Act, the Data Governance Act, and the ongoing ripple effects of transatlantic legal friction (particularly the tensions created by the US CLOUD Act) have built several more floors on top of it. The result is a framework that increasingly determines not just what data your organisation holds, but which tools you are permitted to use to manage, transfer, share, and store it. This has direct, practical consequences for data centre operations teams. The monitoring platform you log into each morning, the cloud storage your engineers use to share runbooks, the ticketing system where incidents are logged, the collaboration suite where shift handovers happen: if any of these tools are operated by a company headquartered outside the EU, they may now carry a compliance risk that regulators are no longer prepared to overlook. As explored in a broader look at why data security is no longer optional, the costs of underestimating this shift go well beyond fines. The sovereignty problem in plain terms Data sovereignty, at its core, is the principle that data generated within a jurisdiction should remain subject to that jurisdiction's laws, regardless of where it is physically stored or which company's servers it sits on. In the EU context, this means that personal data relating to European citizens and businesses should not be accessible to foreign governments or legal systems without going through EU legal channels and oversight. The complication arises from the US CLOUD Act, signed into law in 2018. This legislation grants US authorities the power to compel American technology companies to hand over data, even data stored on servers in Europe, without necessarily requiring a formal mutual legal assistance treaty process. For a European organisation using a US-headquartered SaaS provider, this creates what regulators have called an active legal paradox: data that appears to be stored safely in an EU data centre may still be legally accessible to a non-EU government. It is a risk that regulators across France, Germany, the Netherlands, and beyond are treating with increasing seriousness. Enforcement actions against US cloud providers by national data protection authorities have grown steadily, and the appetite for leniency is diminishing. Where operations teams feel it The challenge for data centre teams is that the operational tooling that makes modern facilities function efficiently has, over the past decade, migrated almost entirely into the cloud - and largely into platforms operated by American technology companies. This was a rational progression: the tools were excellent, the pricing was competitive, and the compliance requirements, while present, were manageable. That calculus is changing. The categories of software that carry the most exposure include: • DCIM platforms — If telemetry, asset data, or incident records are routed through non-EU cloud infrastructure, they may be subject to foreign access requests. • Ticketing and ITSM systems — Incident logs can contain sensitive operational and customer data, and where these records are stored and processed matters legally. • Collaboration and file-sharing tools — Runbooks, change documentation, and engineering notes shared via US-headquartered platforms may not satisfy GDPR data processing requirements. • Monitoring and observability platforms — Network performance data, access logs, and infrastructure health metrics can constitute sensitive data under certain regulatory interpretations. • Email and calendar services — Operational communications may be covered by data residency requirements, particularly in regulated sectors such as finance or healthcare. The question teams are increasingly being asked by compliance officers, enterprise customers during audits, and regulators during inspections is not simply "is this data encrypted?" but "under whose legal jurisdiction does this data sit, and who could compel access to it?" Industry voices have been making this point for some time, as reflected in commentary gathered on Data Privacy Day, where the emphasis fell squarely on building repeatable operational controls rather than chasing individual compliance milestones. The sovereign cloud push The response from the market has been a wave of "sovereign cloud" offerings: architecture models where infrastructure, operational staff, and legal entities are all resident within the EU, and where data is contractually and technically ringfenced from parent-company access in non-EU jurisdictions. Several major hyperscalers have invested heavily in these products. Microsoft's EU Data Boundary, Google's Sovereign Controls, and AWS's EU Sovereign Cloud are all attempts to provide assurances that European data will not traverse US legal jurisdiction. Whether these assurances are sufficient, given that the parent companies remain subject to US law, remains contested amongst legal scholars and regulators. Germany and France, in particular, have pushed back on the idea that a US company's technical commitments can fully override a foreign court order. The EU's Gaia-X initiative represents the most ambitious attempt to build a native alternative: a federated, interoperable digital infrastructure that reduces dependency on non-European hyperscalers entirely. Progress has been slower than its architects hoped, but the framework it has established around transparency, portability, and provenance of data is increasingly influencing procurement decisions at large European enterprises and public sector bodies. The physical reality of where infrastructure actually sits remains critical to all of this, a point underlined by the lessons drawn from the OVHCloud fire, which demonstrated how quickly assumed protections can evaporate when something goes wrong at the hardware level. Rethinking the toolchain For data centre teams, the practical consequence is a growing need to audit the toolchain - not just the infrastructure they manage for customers, but the tools they use internally to manage that infrastructure. This is a non-trivial task. Many of the most capable platforms in categories like monitoring, ITSM, and collaboration are US-headquartered. Replacing them wholesale is expensive, disruptive, and technically risky. The more pragmatic approach being adopted by many European operators is a tiered assessment: identifying which tools handle which categories of data, and which of those data categories carry the highest regulatory exposure. Operational telemetry that contains no personal data may carry a different risk profile than a shared drive full of customer documentation, change records, and contractual files. The latter category (documents and files shared amongst engineering and operations teams) is one where the market for European-origin alternatives has matured considerably. For file storage and document sharing specifically, a number of privacy-focused alternatives have emerged that offer end-to-end encryption, EU-based infrastructure, and no exposure to US jurisdiction. Proton Drive is one example; being built on zero-access encryption and hosted under Swiss and EU law, it is designed so that even the service provider cannot access the contents of stored files. For operations teams handling sensitive engineering documentation or customer-related records, this kind of architecture addresses the sovereignty question at a technical rather than contractual level. The distinction between technical and contractual sovereignty protections is one that regulators are increasingly paying attention to. A Data Processing Agreement with a US cloud provider commits that provider contractually to certain behaviours; zero-access encryption means that no behaviour, however compelled, can result in plaintext data being handed over, because the keys never leave the customer's control. The compliance burden on operations What makes this period particularly challenging for data centre teams is that sovereignty compliance is not a one-time project; it is a continuous risk assessment process, one that requires keeping pace with an evolving regulatory landscape across multiple EU member states. Germany alone layers 17 state-level data laws on top of national and EU requirements. The practical implication is that an operations team running a facility serving customers across multiple European jurisdictions may need to maintain a sophisticated, jurisdiction-aware view of where data flows, which tools touch it, and which legal regimes apply. The full scope of what that means for day-to-day operations is covered across DCNN's compliance coverage. This is driving demand for a new kind of capability within operations teams: compliance literacy, meaning engineers who understand not just how to configure a monitoring platform, but what data that platform collects, where it sends it, and whether that is consistent with the data processing agreements their organisation holds with its customers. The audit pressure is already here Customer-driven audit pressure is one of the most immediate ways data centre teams are encountering sovereignty requirements in practice. Enterprise customers, particularly those in regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, and government, are increasingly including detailed data residency and toolchain questions in their due diligence processes before signing colocation or managed service contracts. They want to know not just where their data sits, but which third-party tools the data centre operator uses to manage access, monitor systems, and handle incidents, because those tools are part of the data processing chain. A data centre that stores customer data on EU infrastructure but logs all incident management activity through a US-based ITSM platform may have a harder time satisfying those audits than one that has thought carefully about the full operational stack. This connects directly to the broader operational challenges outlined in an earlier look at the key pressures facing data centre operations teams, where compliance and ESG demands were already competing for finite team bandwidth. Looking ahead European data sovereignty is not a temporary regulatory moment; it reflects a deep structural shift in how European governments, regulators, and enterprise customers think about digital infrastructure, one in which the origin and legal jurisdiction of technology matters as much as its performance or price. For data centre teams, this means the toolchain review is not optional. The platforms that operations, engineering, and management teams use every day are now part of the compliance picture. The good news is that the market for sovereign-by-design tooling is expanding, covering everything from monitoring and observability to file storage and secure communications. The teams that will navigate this most successfully are those that start the audit now, before a customer inquiry, a regulatory inspection, or an incident forces the issue. Understanding which tools handle which data, under whose jurisdiction, and with what level of technical protection is not just a compliance exercise; it is increasingly a competitive differentiator.