Sovereignty Without Scale: The Hyperscaler Paradox

European sovereign cloud initiatives are driven by legitimate goals: strategic autonomy, regulatory control, and reduced geopolitical risk. At the same time, regulators and customers expect hyperscaler-grade security, resilience, compliance automation, and feature velocity. This creates a structural tension: we demand hyperscale capabilities while rejecting hyperscale economics and ecosystem depth.

This talk examines that paradox from a customer’s perspective. It explores the maturity gap in security engineering, operational scale, talent density, and supply-chain depth — and why these capabilities cannot simply be mandated into existence. The session outlines what must change for sovereign cloud initiatives to succeed: realistic scope, differentiated capability tiers, ecosystem alignment, and regulatory expectations grounded in technical reality.