Sovereign Cloud Region to be AWS’s First, Located in Brandenburg, Germany
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a substantial investment of €7.8 billion in its sovereign cloud infrastructure in Germany, set to extend through 2040.
The Sovereign Cloud region, the first of its kind for AWS, will be situated in the state of Brandenburg, Germany, with an anticipated launch at the end of 2025.
“This investment underscores our commitment to providing customers with the most advanced set of sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available in the cloud. We are heavily investing in new local talent and infrastructure, which will help deliver the operational sovereignty our customers need,” stated Max Peterson, Vice President of Sovereign Cloud at AWS.
“This is an exciting milestone, and we look forward to seeing how our customers and partners across Europe will drive greater innovation with AWS’s European Sovereign Cloud.”
AWS expects this initiative to generate approximately 2,800 full-time equivalent jobs in Germany annually. These roles will span construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other positions within the broader local economy.
Additionally, the project will create highly skilled permanent roles essential for building and operating the Sovereign Cloud, including software engineers, system developers, and solutions architects.
“A secure, reliable, and high-performance infrastructure is the most important prerequisite for an increasingly digitized economy and society. Brandenburg is making strides in this direction. In recent years, we have set the course for investing in modern and sustainable data center infrastructures in our federal state, strengthening Brandenburg as a business location,” said Prof. Dr. Jörg Steinbach, Minister of Economic Affairs, Labor, and Energy of Brandenburg. “State-of-the-art data centers for secure cloud computing are the foundation of a strong digital economy. I am pleased that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has chosen Brandenburg for a long-term investment in its cloud computing infrastructure for the European Sovereign Cloud.”
AWS first announced plans for a European sovereign cloud region in October 2023.
In September 2023, Virtus Data Centers revealed plans for a 300 MW data center campus in Brandenburg. Google also has a cloud region in Brandenburg.
Oracle has launched two sovereign cloud regions in Frankfurt, Germany, and Madrid, Spain. Digital Realty hosts the EU Sovereign Cloud region in Madrid, while Equinix hosts the region in Frankfurt.
Microsoft and Google also have sovereign cloud offerings, marketed through partners. In 2021, Orange and Capgemini launched the Bleu cloud venture in France to sell Microsoft Azure services from local data centers. In January 2024, Bleu confirmed it would launch by the end of the year.
Google has partnered with T-Systems in Germany, Thales in France, and Proximus in Belgium and Luxembourg. A leaked report suggests that Google considers its trusted partner cloud initiative as its “most important program,” aiming to capture a $100 billion market in Europe and Asia through clouds that meet data sovereignty requirements.