Airbus is preparing a major tender to move mission-critical workloads off US hyperscalers and onto a European sovereign cloud.
The target stack includes ERP, MES, CRM, and PLM for aircraft design, which means core engineering and manufacturing data could shift into new data centers under EU legal control.
This is about jurisdiction and the US CLOUD Act as much as technology, so any vendor pitch here needs clear guarantees on data access, control planes, and admin paths staying in Europe.
US cloud vendors have “sovereign” offerings, but Airbus is signaling it doesn’t trust contractual controls alone and wants infrastructure and operations that regulators view as truly European.
For AI workloads, this move pushes GPU capacity, storage, and networking demand toward EU-based clouds and colos that can satisfy defense-linked export controls and secrecy requirements.
Energy and power density will matter, since replicating hyperscaler-grade AI and HPC capabilities on sovereign soil means fresh investment in European data center capacity, not just new contracts.
The article is worth a read to understand how large industrials are turning sovereignty concerns into concrete infra buying criteria.
