The real block on a Big Tech exit is a five-year signature, not a strategy paper

Contract length is the number that decides this, and it is the number least often quoted. The UK signature landed in 2024 on a five-year term, which puts the earliest natural exit at 2029 ^[3][11]. The European Commission published its AI Continent Action Plan in April 2025, about a year into that term ^[8][12]. The policy is younger than the paperwork it would have to undo.

The plans also aim at the wrong half of the stack. AI factories and gigafactories put public supercomputers and datasets behind model training ^[8], but Rest of World's observation is that European startups trained on EU machines are still likely to deploy through Big Tech clouds ^[14]. Training is a grant. Deployment is a contract.

The emerging-economy versions have the same shape under different names. IndiaAI and Brazil's plan both lean harder on the public sector, and both still treat cloud as infrastructure as a service rather than decoupling from it ^[15]. The Indian advisory group that proposed the FutureLab AI Compute Infrastructure included Intel and Oracle employees, and if the recommendation is adopted the government builds it with Intel and Oracle, on top of edtech and healthtech services already running on Oracle infrastructure ^[9]. In Brazil, state-owned telecoms and data companies want an intermediate compute layer for the public sector, with US vendors continuing to supply the black-boxed core underneath ^[10]. Rest of World's conclusion on all three is that none has meaningfully expanded sovereignty against the cloud giants, and none touches intellectual monopolisation ^[16].

The 2024 outage is worth re-reading as a sizing exercise. A cybersecurity partner's error took out 8.5 million Windows devices, which the report puts at under 1% of the installed base ^[1]. Run that backwards and the base is north of 850 million machines ^[13]. That fraction closed airports, delayed airlines and reached US emergency services, banking, stock markets and hospitals [c1b]. It was the concentration lesson of the same year the UK committed to five more.

Two procurement details deserve more attention than the strategy documents get. Germany's arrangement runs through AWS and its German partner Bechtle AG ^[4], and New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs holds an all-of-government deal with Google Cloud ^[5]. A reseller in the middle and a whole-of-government scope both turn substitution into a negotiation rather than a switch. Meanwhile the source of truth on what these deals actually contain is unreliable: Project Nimbus, worth $1.2 billion across Google and Amazon, became public after employees at both firms described what it was built for ^[7]. Governments that outsource control technologies to acquire them end up regulating vendors they depend on ^[17], and the dependency has a renewal date long before it has a policy answer.