Put Cloud Sovereignty, Resilience, and Fair Competition at the Heart of CADA

Brussels, 17th March 2026. Today, ahead of a roundtable discussion with Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen, CEOs representing 25 of Europe’s cloud and digital service providers sent her a letter outlining what they want to see from the forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA). The CEOs are united in their call for five easily adopted principles to guide essential investment in Europe’s digital economy. As the first EU legislation to directly address the vital cloud and AI sector, these CEOs see a once in a lifetime opportunity to mitigate the growing dominance of overseas players in this critical area.

The letter outlines the following as critical if the CADA is to deliver on its ambition to drive European growth through digital leadership:

1. 1. Sovereignty must be defined by control, not simply by having EU presence or meeting cybersecurity standards.
   2. Where sovereignty is not feasible, resilience – or operational autonomy – must be ensured to mitigate third-party interference through safeguards such as customer-controlled encryption, data portability, and technical reversibility.
   3. Europe should introduce reserved procurement shares for European cloud providers. At the very least, public procurement should follow a clear principle: “Buy European – Ensure Resilience – or Explain.”
   4. Europe’s cloud policy should reinforce competition, interoperability, and federated European cloud initiatives, while preventing anti-competitive bundling of AI and cloud services.
   5. Taxpayer-funded investments in cloud and AI infrastructure should prioritise the European ecosystem.

Speaking ahead of the meeting with EVP Virkkunen, Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General of CISPE said: “CADA is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put Europe back on the front foot in the digital economy, and we must not squander it by legitimising ‘sovereignty-washing’. A gigawatt of sovereign European cloud and AI infrastructure must mean investing in Europe’s digital future and its strategic autonomy. Otherwise, Europe will simply deepen its dependence on overseas cloud giants.

The full text of the letter and its signatories can be seen here:

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