I think your question is a very hard one to answer because you bundle a bunch of rather complicated things together in it.

Europeans in general are probably more privacy concerned than Americans. Well, sort of. Where Americans, really, really, really, don’t want their governments to invade their privacy, many Europeans are more cool with it because we have a higher trust in our government. On the flip-side, almost no European wants private companies to have any rights over our data, I mean, not enough to not use Instagram or TikTok but still. This is of course a little simplistic since we have countries like Germany which are very privacy concerned in regards to both private and public organisations, and with rather good reason. You also have the French which are rather opposed to private ownership of public services, meaning they have some pretty hardline laws which are keeping much of their public software open source.

That’s just one part of your question, however, because you also talk about companies like Hetzner. These companies are positioning themselves very favourable for the eventual European exodus from American clouds. Many people on HN might not be too aware or just how much money Microsoft and Amazon are raking in from the European public sector. It’s with good reason too, well, maybe less with the yearly price hikes. Anyway, about two decades ago we stated moving our “iron” into the cloud in the Danish public sector, at first it was by “renting” hardware with companies somewhat similar to Hetzner, except you owned the hardware and just rented the racks and housing. Around a decade ago, most business cases made Azure a very attractive replacement, partly because of how Microsoft sells licenses to enterprise partly because your very talented IT operations people could use their skills in Azure. AWS also gained some good ground, but here in Denmark it’s basically all Microsoft and economically speaking this is the biggest piece of the IT pie in my country. (Probably in any EU country really).

The EU isn’t happy about this for a range of reasons. Some of them are economic, others are defense oriented. In the green energy sector, finance and other “vital” industries the EU has decided that having everyone hosted in Azure is maybe not a good idea. Then there are the privacy concerns, danish citizens might be ok with their medical history being online for the Danish healthcare systems to use, but they’re not ok with the data being used to train LLMs. Now… it’s tinfoil but with all the privacy scandals you also really can’t blame people for not believing that Microsoft honours their agreements to actually let no one (not even the NSA) snoop. There are also EU and US relations, I think Trump 2016 was a system shock for the EU. There is a reason we trust US tech companies and not Chinese tech companies, and that trust has been irreparably shaken. So for the past few years, we’ve seen a huge spike in interest in the field of EU alternatives to Azure and AWS because a lot of people are hoping to have places themselves in good spots if/when things start to move.

It’s not going to happen all at once, and it’s not going to happen fast. But even if you score a single EU city’s contract for 4-8 years, you can frankly keep your company running just on that. What has helped this position even more is the price hikes in Azure. Even in the private sector, everyone is weighing their options around here. Many have already left, some cancelled their planned moves but we’re all doing the calculations.