- European Cloud IaaS growth will surpass that of China and North America
- Europe will even surpass North America in terms of dollars spent
- For now, only 20% of current workloads will change – the scale is enormous
According to new Gartner projections, global sovereign spending on cloud IaaS could rise from $59.3 billion in 2025 to $80.4 billion in 2026 before reaching $110.6 billion in 2027, a nearly two-fold increase, but there is geography leading the way on this front.
European sovereign spending on cloud IaaS, which will rise from $6.7 billion in 2025 to more than $23.1 billion in 2027, will more than triple over the same period, highlighting a huge appetite for more on-premise solutions.
That puts growth in Europe (the third-largest region in terms of dollars spent, behind North America and China) well ahead of the other two global superpowers, with about twice the growth.
Europe leads sovereign cloud spending
Although Europe is slightly behind other regions globally, Europe is approximately three times larger (in terms of spending) than all other regions combined, so it has much greater influence on a global scale.
In fact, growth is expected to be so high that Europe is likely to overtake North America and take second place as early as 2027, with governments, regulated industries and critical services most likely accounting for the majority of migrations.
However, despite the massive growth, Gartner only expects about a fifth of current workloads to shift from global hyperscalers to local or regional cloud providers, suggesting this is a much longer-term shift.
“To compete for local customers’ cloud business, large cloud providers must seriously recognize each country’s sovereignty concerns and requirements, and act accordingly,” wrote senior director analyst René Buest.
Gartner analysts are not the only ones expecting to see significant growth across Europe. Forrester predicts that European technology spending will reach €1.5 trillion in 2026 for the first time, driven by demand for artificial intelligence, the cloud, cybersecurity and, of course, sovereignty.
“Europe’s focus on technological sovereignty will likely reshape supplier dynamics and infrastructure options in the coming years,” wrote forecast analyst Michael O’Grady.
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