Trade body for Amazon, Google and Meta funds study pricing EU cloud act at €115bn

The pieces of ECIPE's total do not fit together on the page. The gap between €115bn and €18bn is €97bn ^[4][14]. The two omissions that carry a stated figure, €33.3bn in direct public budget exposure and up to €80bn in private-sector spill-overs, add up to €113.3bn ^[5][18][15]. That exceeds the gap. If the 69% share ECIPE assigns to re-architecting applies to the full €115bn, the software line alone is about €79bn ^[6][16], close to the spill-over ceiling of €80bn. The itpro account does not include ECIPE's method, a Commission response or a date for member-state decisions.

A skeptic would say that a study paid for by a trade body whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta was always going to find a large number ^[2]. The same body asks that trusted international partners such as its members be exempt from Article 18 country screening ^[10]. Both points are fair, and they are reason enough to carry €115bn as an advocate's figure. The cost category is a separate question, and a buyer can check it locally. Mitchell Rutledge, CCIA Europe's policy manager ^[13], said: "Businesses cannot simply switch servers; they must redesign software and rewrite code across entire supply chains." ^[9] A buyer can count how many of its applications run on global cloud platforms and fall in the sectors Article 31 covers ^[7].

The cost is conditional on choices not yet made. The Act as proposed excludes non-EU providers from parts of the cloud and AI market ^[3], and CCIA Europe wants member states to limit sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads where specific public-order risks are demonstrated ^[10]. A buyer in the affected sectors faces a trade-off. Re-architecting now spends engineering time on rules that member states may narrow. Waiting means a later start on the rewrite if they do not. An inventory of exposed applications commits little, and in our view it is the step this quarter supports. Once member states take positions on Article 31, the inventory turns a sector-wide figure into a number for the buyer's own estate.

The market is moving ahead of the rule. AWS's European Sovereign Cloud keeps enterprise data hosted and stored solely in the region, and Microsoft and Google make similar promises ^[11]. Gartner found in research published earlier this year that one in five European workloads is moving to local clouds, and that spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure in the region is set to triple between 2025 and 2027 ^[20]. That movement is under way while the Act is still a proposal ^[1], so a buyer's migration budget is likely to mix the trend's cost with the Act's.