In late 2025, Europe codified the foundations of its sovereign cloud requirements, aimed at providing companies with a way to assess if a cloud provider’s services are compliant with EU regulations, and how much visibility foreign jurisdictions had into data-in-transfer.
Now, there are big questions over the opportunities and challenges sovereign cloud providers face in navigating a new regulatory framework, the strain placed on the transatlantic relationship, and where frontier AI models fit into this new European technological project.
Casper Klynge is Zscaler’s Vice President, Head of Government Partnerships and Public Policy across EMEA, and at Zscaler Zenith Live 2026 I was given the opportunity to hear the perspectives of a former Ambassador on Europe’s place in the global technology landscape.
Opportunities for European cloud
Since 2019, the revenue from the European cloud market has more than doubled, but the share of European cloud providers within the market has hovered below 20%, indicating just how reliant Europe is on US hyperscalers for its compute.
“It’s not sort of a zero-sum game. There’s actually room for European competitors to grow in specific markets,” Klynge said in response to my question about the ability of European cloud companies to compete in a market dominated by the US.
“What we are really seeing now with this tech sovereignty package that came out a few weeks ago is that Europe is trying to codify sovereignty requirements for the first time ever… And my cynical view on this is that the companies that will not respond, will not align with those requirements, will have difficulties in the European market looking ahead,” he explains.
For companies looking to capitalise on potential new markets in Europe, many businesses would do well to heed Klynge’s advice. From the perspective of Zscaler, whose software sits between users and the cloud, the response to these requirements has been one of opportunity.
“Let’s make sure that we innovate and build our technology stack in a way that is compliant or perhaps overcompliant so that we know that we will be seen as a company that is aligning with the European agenda,” he says
The opportunities for small European cloud providers aren’t necessarily in creating an all encompassing solution, Klynge explains, but rather in specialization. “You’ve had more…niche, industry cloud companies grow up that are more focused on healthcare or more focused on the automotive industry.”
AI reliance
AI is another industry seeing a call for European sovereignty, especially in the wake of the recent suspension of foreign access to Anthropic’s powerful Mythos and Fable vulnerability-hunting models. When I put to Klynge the question of which industries will see the most immediate impact of AI as a whole, he shares a different perspective.
“I think the problem is that there’s too much focus on sort of the foundation for your question, which is who will benefit the most, and there’s been too little focus on how do you protect and defend those opportunities,” he explains.
“In other words, too much focus on productivity gains, way too little focus on rolling that out in organisations in a way where you actually don’t create vulnerabilities at a pretty critical moment.”
As I explored during the opening keynote of Zscaler CEO and Founder Jay Chaudhry, AI is creating new and unprecedented risks for businesses, with many organisations finding an immediate way to address the threats that AI and AI agents are bringing to every industry.
Zscaler’s unique position
When it comes to the broader question of where Zscaler sits in the discussion of European tech sovereignty, business security, and AI, Klynge points to the company’s unique position as a security software provider.
“We are cloud agnostic, you can choose to use our cloud, I think the number is around 26 data centers in Europe right now. You can also choose to go with some of the hyperscalers. You can choose to go with European smaller competitors,” he notes.
“The biggest flexibility we bring to the table right now is actually to secure the operational use of AI models. That choice is a fantastic opportunity for customers to say…’if one day we’d like to get OpenAI,’ great. ‘If the next day we wanna go with this style,’ perfectly fine. We have the same framework around it.”
“The tougher the digital sovereignty requirements will be, the better it will actually be for us, because our technology is sovereign by default.”
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benedict.collins@futurenet.com (Benedict Collins)
