AWS and SAP Expand Collaboration to Advance Digital Sovereignty Across Europe – Silicon Canals
AWS and SAP are deepening their longtime partnership to bring SAP’s sovereign cloud capabilities to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud environment tailored for Europe. The move is aimed squarely at organizations with strict regulatory obligations—public sector bodies, financial institutions, healthcare providers, utilities—and any enterprise that wants to innovate with AI while keeping tight control over data, operations, and compliance across the EU.
What’s launching: a European-built, European-operated cloud
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is planned to go live with its first Region in Brandenburg, Germany by the end of 2025, backed by a multibillion-euro investment. Designed from the ground up for European requirements, this cloud will be separate from existing AWS Regions and architected without critical dependencies on non-EU infrastructure. The goal: give customers EU-based data residency, operational autonomy, and high resilience—without sacrificing the breadth of services or the security posture associated with AWS.
For enterprises navigating GDPR, sector-specific regulations, and upcoming frameworks, the promise of an infrastructure fabric that is both independent and familiar is compelling. It signals a path to modernize core systems, adopt AI responsibly, and meet sovereignty expectations within Europe’s legal and policy landscape.
SAP’s sovereign stack lands first with BTP and Cloud ERP
At launch, SAP plans to make initial offerings available on this sovereign cloud foundation, including:
- SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) for building, integrating, and extending applications with strong guardrails.
- SAP Cloud ERP to manage core business processes and sensitive data under sovereignty-focused controls.
These capabilities are designed to help customers run mission-critical operations while aligning with local compliance requirements. Importantly, this isn’t SAP’s first sovereign rollout with AWS: similar capabilities are already live in Australia and New Zealand, the UK, and—more recently—Canada and India. Bringing the portfolio to Europe expands choice for multinational organizations that want consistent controls across regions, and for EU-based entities that demand EU-centric assurance.
Why it matters for regulated sectors—and creators working with sensitive data
Digital sovereignty has moved from buzzword to business imperative. Leaders want the freedom to adopt cloud-native and AI tools while retaining control over where data resides, who can operate the environment, and how services remain available under stress. This collaboration is meant to support:
- Data residency and access transparency—ensuring data stays within the EU and is handled under EU-governed processes.
- Operational autonomy—clear separation of control planes and day-to-day operations from non-EU dependencies.
- Resilience—enterprise-grade continuity, backed by independently operated European infrastructure.
There’s also a creative angle. Game and XR studios increasingly handle sensitive telemetry, biometrics, and location data, especially in mixed-reality and healthcare-adjacent use cases. EU-native AI services with sovereignty guarantees could make it easier to build privacy-first personalization, real-time analytics, and immersive experiences for European audiences—while satisfying strict compliance regimes. For publishers and esports platforms managing large user datasets, a sovereign cloud can streamline audits and lower the compliance burden when scaling across EU markets.
A partnership tuned for the AI era
AWS and SAP have collaborated for well over a decade as enterprises shifted ERP and surrounding workloads to the cloud. This next phase aligns SAP’s enterprise software expertise—finance, supply chain, HR, customer operations—with AWS’s infrastructure depth, bringing a more sovereignty-aware foundation for AI adoption. The intent is to let organizations innovate faster with guardrails in place, reducing the trade-offs between modernization and control.
What to do now: preparation steps for early adopters
With the first European Region slated by the end of 2025, IT leaders and builders can start laying groundwork today:
- Map data flows and classify workloads by sovereignty sensitivity (personal data, industry-specific records, telemetry).
- Align controls with EU regulations such as GDPR and sector rules, and prepare for evolving frameworks like NIS2 and DORA.
- Pilot extensions on SAP BTP to validate integration patterns, identity and access policies, and data localization behaviors.
- Establish operational runbooks for EU-only administration, logging, and incident response.
- Plan multi-Region continuity within Europe, including backup, disaster recovery, and failover testing.
- Upskill teams on responsible AI practices—governance, model lifecycle, and privacy-preserving techniques.
Outlook
Bringing SAP’s sovereign-ready services to an EU-operated AWS cloud is a clear signal: Europe’s cloud transformation is accelerating, but not at the expense of control. For regulated enterprises—and for creators working with sensitive data in gaming and XR—the combination of modern cloud tooling, AI enablement, and sovereignty assurances could unlock projects that were previously stalled by compliance complexity. As the Brandenburg Region comes online and the service set grows, expect more organizations to recalibrate their cloud strategy around this European-first approach to innovation.
