Europe is moving decisively away from U.S. tech giants toward open-source alternatives, driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and reliability of American companies[1]. At the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, industry leaders emphasized that this shift isn’t about isolation but resilience.
“What we’re really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source allows us to be sovereign without being isolated,” said OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez[1:1].
This transition is already happening. The German state Schleswig-Holstein has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email solutions. Similar moves have been made by the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon[1:2].
European companies are stepping up to fill the gap with open-source alternatives, including:
- Deutsche Telekom’s Open Telekom Cloud
- OVHcloud’s sovereign cloud services
- STACKIT and VanillaCore’s European-based offerings[1:3]
The movement gained additional momentum when the European Commission appointed its first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024[1:4].
Sadly, the move to open-source is not driven though a choice to embrace the open concepts. It’s the only choice if you want to move away from American software and services because Europe has continually sold its startups off to American giants. Europe’s giants are relics from he post-ww2 era or before, and generally they don’t innovate.
I think this new course is a good thing, but there’s going to be a lot of pain as expectations change.
This is not generally true. Large cloud service companies like OVH or Hetzner are quite recent “start ups” in the more traditional meaning of that word (as opposed to artificially inflated VC backed aquisition targets).
The problem is rather that most European companies and public institutions have disinvested from inhouse IT expertise and are thus fully dependent on turnkey solutions and large US companies have exploited that to lock them in.
For every Hetzner there’s 10-20 companies that are now part of Google / Meta / Intel / Apple. My point is, they’re not part of a Hetzner like company. They get consumed and spit out of American companies and Europe is forever in startup mode.