Sovereign cloud

A sovereign cloud is a cloud infrastructure and service offering built to keep a customer's data, operations and administrative access within a specific national or regional jurisdiction, run by entities meeting that jurisdiction's legal and personnel-residency requirements, so the data stays outside the reach of foreign laws such as the US CLOUD Act. It differs from plain data residency, which only constrains where data is stored, by also controlling who can operate and access the infrastructure — sovereign cloud offerings typically require in-country staff and support, and sometimes local ownership or a joint-venture structure with the hyperscaler. The EU has pushed hardest on this model, with AWS European Sovereign Cloud, Microsoft's EU Data Boundary and Google's Cloud Sovereign Controls all launched between 2023 and 2026, alongside home-grown providers like OVHcloud and Schwarz Digits' StackIT. Sovereign cloud demand increasingly factors into data center site selection, pushing hyperscalers toward local partnerships rather than wholly owned regions in regulation-sensitive markets.