Trump’s Aggression Sours Europe on US Cloud Giants

The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. “There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former, decade-long member of the European Parliament. Days before, more than 100 organizations signed an open letter to European officials calling for the continent to become “more technologically independent” and saying the status quo creates “security and reliability risks.” Two European-based cloud service companies, Exoscale and Elastx, tell WIRED they have seen an uptick in potential customers looking to abandon US cloud providers over the last two weeks—with some already starting to make the jump. “We have more demand from across Europe,” says Mathias Nöbauer, the CEO of Swiss-based hosting provider Exoscale, adding there has been an increase in new customers seeking to move away from cloud giants.