- European Cloud IaaS growth will surpass China and North America's
- Europe will even overtake North America in terms of dollars spent
- Just 20% of current workloads will shift for now – the scale is massive
According to new Gartner projections, worldwide sovereign Cloud IaaS spending could climb from $59.3 billion in 2025 to $80.4 billion in 2026 before hitting $110.6 billion in 2027, making a near-twofold increase, but one geography leads the way on this front.
Set to rise from $6.7 billion in 2025 to over $23.1 billion in 2027, European sovereign Cloud IaaS spending will more than triple during the same period, highlighting a huge appetite for more local solutions.
That puts Europe's growth (the third-largest region in terms of dollars spent, behind North America and China) way ahead of the other two global superpowers, with around twice as much growth.
Europe leads cloud sovereign spend
Though Europe falls slightly behind some other regions globally, Europe is around three times bigger (spend-wise) than all other regions combined, so it has a far bigger influence on a global scale.
In fact, growth is expected to be so high that Europe is likely to overtake North America into second place as early as 2027, with governments, regulated industries and critical services most likely accounting for the bulk of migrations.
However, despite massive growth, Gartner only expects around one-fifth of current workloads to shift from global hyperscalers to local or regional cloud providers, suggesting this is a much longer-term change.
"To compete for local customers’ cloud business, large cloud providers must seriously acknowledge the sovereignty concerns and requirements per country, and act accordingly," Senior Director Analyst Rene Buest wrote.
Gartner's analysts aren't the only ones expecting to see significant growth across Europe. Forrester anticipates European tech spending to hit €1.5 trillion in 2026 for the first time ever, driven by demand for AI, cloud, cybersecurity and of course, sovereignty.
"Europe’s focus on tech sovereignty will likely reshape vendor dynamics and infrastructure choices for years to come," Forecast Analyst Michael O'Grady wrote.
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