US tech giants are warning that Europe's push to reduce reliance on American cloud providers could carry a heavy price tag. A study commissioned by CCIA Europe, a lobbying group whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, claims the European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could cost €115 billion over ten years. That is more than six times the Commission's own upper estimate of €18 billion. The research was conducted by the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE).
The study puts direct public-sector costs at €33.3 billion, with a further €80 billion potentially falling on private companies in banking, healthcare, energy, and transport. However, that larger figure is a modeled scenario, not a confirmed bill: it assumes the Commission extends sovereignty requirements beyond public procurement to cover 25 percent of cloud workloads in essential private-sector industries. The report also claims that rewriting and re-architecting software would account for 69 percent of the estimated costs, with Luxembourg, Denmark, Austria, Finland, and Ireland facing the largest per-worker impacts.
CCIA has a clear stake in the outcome. Amazon and Google, both members, dominate the European cloud market and have been developing sovereign cloud offerings aimed at addressing data-access concerns. The group is urging EU governments to overhaul CADA, limit sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads, and drop requirements based on corporate origin or personnel nationality in favor of risk-based technical safeguards. "Taxpayers and businesses will foot the bill, yet the official assessment missed 70 percent of CADA's true impact," said Mitchell Rutledge, CCIA Europe's policy manager. Neither company responded to The Register's questions about the study.