€115 billion, mostly the cost of leaving. And it grows every year you stay.
Big Tech's lobby says Europe's cloud sovereignty law will cost €115 billion. Its own study shows where most of that money goes: undoing lock-in.
On 14 October, The Register reported the study, by the Brussels think tank ECIPE and paid for by CCIA Europe, a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta. Its central estimate: €115 billion over ten years. The Commission's own upper estimate, The Register notes, is €18 billion.
About 69 percent of the total is rewriting and re-architecting software: systems built around one provider's own services, rebuilt to run anywhere else. The study says the Commission left that cost out, and by its numbers that is most of the gap. It's the price of dependency, charged at the exit, and it grows with every year you keep building that way.
On 18 October, the US ambassador to the EU, Andrew Puzder, told the Financial Times that European companies should be wary of retaliation if Brussels favors European satellite operators over American ones. It "would be very devastating for those companies", he said. He took aim at the cloud law too.
None of this is new. In August 2025, President Trump threatened tariffs and chip export limits on countries with digital rules he dislikes. In December, the US trade office named nine European firms, SAP and Mistral among them, that could face "fees or restrictions". In February, a cable signed by Secretary of State Rubio told US diplomats to lobby against data sovereignty laws abroad.
Leaving is real work. Everything the vendor did for you, from the security patch to the Sunday outage, becomes your job or a contractor's. Anyone who says sovereignty is simply cheaper hasn't run it.
Here's where I half agree with the lobby. It wants Brussels to drop rules based on a company's origin. Puzder says it his way: don't favor your own firms. Both aim at the weakest flank of Europe's push, the buy-European reflex. "Pick a European supplier" is easy to brand as protectionism, and no country outside Europe can adopt it. Only half, though: the same lobby wants firms from countries with EU procurement deals, the US among them, exempted. That's an origin rule too, just one that suits it.
A rule built on open standards is different. Can your data leave in a format another system reads? Can a foreign court order reach your provider? Can someone else run the software if your supplier fails? Any vendor can be asked that, American ones included, and today US-controlled ones fail the second.
Washington will fight that rule too: Rubio's cable named GDPR. But others can copy it. GDPR became a model far beyond Europe because it bound every company selling to Europeans, wherever it came from. That's the export worth building: rules anyone can adopt, on standards nobody owns.
Ask for your own number. If you had to leave your main cloud provider next year, what would the rewrite cost? And what will it cost in three years if nothing changes?
