Airbus Takes Flight from AWS: The Critical Battle for Digital Sovereignty
Airbus is moving 900 critical applications from AWS to French provider Scaleway to secure European data sovereignty. While this migration proves digital sovereignty is a real commercial driver, challenges remain with supply chain management and AI. The company avoids US-based AI for critical systems, signaling a need for a robust EU software market to fully escape American digital hegemony.
America is now on that list of places where states could help themselves to sensitive data, so it's best to repatriate them sharpish.
- cleverfoo
What doesn't get talked about in these articles is the increasing impact to small business in the US.
I run a small business (scanii.com) and I've noticed over the past year an increasing number of customers leaving us to European competitors, customers that have been happy with us for years, using our European region, but now have concerns over US foreign policy and are giving preferred treatment to EU suppliers. When I asked they said, I'm paraphrasing here, "happy with the product but management wants EU supplier".
What this means in practical terms is that, if the tide doesn't change, US entrepreneurs will have a potential buyer population that is roughly cut in half if they can only sell to US buyers. This will have a cascading negative effect in the number of startups that succeed - impossible to quantify at this point.
Large corps can skirt around this issue by establishing an EU entity and trying to buy goodwill that way but that's not an option easily available to small businesses.
I fear rough waters ahead.
- PaulRobinson
US tech does not understand or comprehend the amount of damage they’ve self inflicted in the last couple of years. There will be a steady drip of this in years to come, I suspect.
- Zsfe510asG
Is Airbus still using Google workspaces for mail? Nice vector for industrial espionage.
Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place? It seems complete overkill for a company like that.
- inigyou
I don't fully understand why companies use AWS. Is it a management driven or engineering driven decision? I assume management - in big companies some exec from Amazon comes to play golf, and in small companies the managers copy what the big companies are doing?
- leopoldj
This link is an opinion piece. For a better technical and legal background this link from the same The Register is much better:
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/16/airbus-...
- khurs
Jane Street recently posted a video of their datacenter warehouse in USA on YouTube
Most of this large building was empty... they said that as compute had become dense along with advancements in liquid cooling, the same amount of power x years ago now only required few racks.
No need for many companies to go on cloud, at a minimum should be hybrid on prem.
- spwa4
So after the 2008 spying scandal (cia got caught using German intelligence bases to steal airbus designs), Airbus ran it's critical applications ... on AWS?
Wow.
- sparkling
>Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.
[x] doubt
There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.