AWS Summit Hamburg: all about sovereignty

In contrast to the weather, which, typical of Hamburg, was a back and forth of rain and sun, AWS’ messaging was very consistent across the event: a full focus on sovereignty.

While the recent AWS Summit London was dominated by generative and agentic AI, Stefan Höchbauer, Managing Director Germany and Europe Central, started his keynote with “what’s top of mind for many: how can German businesses continue to innovate while maintaining digital sovereignty?”

How German businesses innovate

Of course, AI and other cloud-based innovation was omnipresent in Hamburg, too.

Donya-Florence Amer from Hapag-Lloyd illustrated the cloud-based digital transformation of the container shipping giant, from booking to port management to transparency throughout the ship journey and the last mile delivery.

Dr. Steffen Merkel from Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL) explained how they innovate the fan journey with offers like “Match Facts” (live processing of data into statistics) and “Bundesliga Stories” (insights and behind-the-scenes stories about clubs and players). 

Further examples included Siemens, which transformed its global search experience by adopting Amazon Nova and Amazon Bedrock, and BMW, which leverages generative AI across the entire value chain.

However, there was hardly any case study in which security and sovereignty were not the overarching themes.

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Kevin Miller, VP Global Data Centers at AWS, set the scene by highlighting AWS’ global scalability, security, the breadth of AWS’ service portfolio, and the innovative power ranging from highly efficient, purpose-built chips to compute, storage, networking, and databases to solutions like generative and agentic AI, including use cases like application modernization and transformation. In addition, he presented Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, a single data analytics and AI development environment that brings together functionalities and tools from both worlds – an example of conveniently pre-bundled building blocks.

Stefan Höchbauer highlighted AWS’ commitment to Germany. This includes AWS signing a cooperation agreement with the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) to develop and adapt standards and validation processes for cloud environments. And it is underlined by massive investments in Germany: €9.6 billion has already been invested, another €8.8 billion is planned between 2024 and 2026.

In addition, AWS is investing into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Brandenburg; it will go live by the end of 2025 and allow customers to keep all data and metadata in the EU. The announced investment plans total €7.8 billion by 2040 for infrastructure, job creation, and skill development. Originally announced as a new cloud dedicated to customers in highly regulated industries and the EU public sector, it will actually be available for all interested clients. As usual, the cloud will offer multiple Availability Zones connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.

Adding operational autonomy to sovereignty-related aspects like data residency, resiliency, and security, AWS even announced the establishment of a new German company that bears responsibility for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

New governance structure of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Shortly before the Hamburg event in June 2025, AWS announced the establishment of a new European organization and operating model for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Key features of the new governance structure are as follows:

• There will be four new dedicated companies registered in Germany: a parent company and three subsidiaries in charge of infrastructure, personnel, and relevant trust certificates.
• AWS Vice President (and German national) Kathrin Renz will serve as the first managing director of the new company. She will be legally bound to act in the best interest of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
• AWS will establish an independent advisory board for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud that is legally obligated to act in the best interest of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
• Only EU-resident AWS employees will have control over operations and support.
• To ensure continuity even under extreme circumstances, authorized employees who are EU residents, will have independent access to a replica of the source code needed to maintain the AWS European Sovereign Cloud services.
• It will feature its own billing and usage metering systems.

AWS promises customers of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud an independently operated but fully-featured sovereign cloud, i.e., it will provide the full AWS service portfolio, security, availability, performance, familiar architecture, and APIs.

PAC’s view

All hyperscalers have recently announced multi-billion Euro investments in sovereign options for their solutions. The money will not only go to new data centers but also new concepts related to data access, data residency, encryption, and operational controls.

While other players partner with EU-headquartered service partners and/or rely on technical solutions and/or distributed or fully disconnected on-premises options, AWS goes one step further: in addition to technical controls and sovereign assurances in existing AWS Regions, AWS establishes a local operating company for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Some legal classifications are still pending, e.g., whether classic European AWS Regions and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be recognized as a multi-cloud architecture by the regulators.

Future demand for sovereign solutions is not fully transparent. Nevertheless, many players are positioning themselves with a great variety of offers ranging from local public clouds to private cloud approaches to regional consortia designed to act as a counterweight to the global giants. In Europe alone, PAC follows far more than 100 vendors that explicitly address sovereign cloud approaches. We observe similar trends in other regions, like Japan and India.

However, AWS would not be making these investments if it did not anticipate a relevant pipeline.

This is confirmed by PAC’s market figures, which suggest that digital sovereignty is experiencing enormous momentum. The market will be limited to the EU in some areas, but the overall trend will clearly benefit from the global hyperscalers getting involved, even if this will require additional measures.

I’m happy to say that we will soon have greater clarity, as PAC is about to launch an EU-wide survey among IT and business decision-makers to learn more about their sovereignty-related pain points, strategies, and investment plans