Airbus towards farewell to big tech: 'EU sovereign cloud for data'

Airbus wants to challenge one of the European industry's deepest dependencies: that on Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This was said by the vice-president for digital affairs of the European aeronautics giant, Catherine Jestin, quoted by French broadcaster Bfm, according to whom the group is preparing a tender to bring 'mission critical' applications and data to a Europe's "digitally sovereign" cloud, with the explicit aim of reducing exposure to US regulations such as the CLOUD Act (the 2018 law that can force cloud providers under US jurisdiction to hand over data they control, even if that data is stored in Europe). The match will open in early January 2026 and is worth over EUR 50 million over a horizon of up to ten years.

Airbus is thinking about the transfer of systems that, in a global industrial group, are equivalent to the nervous system: ERP and CRM (resource, accounting, customer and contract management), manufacturing-related tools and product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms. These are the environments where supply chains, factory processes, design data and integration with suppliers and partners pass through, everything that - if read or altered - produces damage that is not only economic but strategic. This is also why Jestin speaks of information that is "extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective".

In the background, there is a second realisation: many large European companies have already adopted US cloud and collaborative suites for day-to-day productivity, but the 'heart' of the systems often still remains on-premise (i.e. running on servers and data centres managed by the company or by a dedicated provider under its direct control) or on hybrid architectures, precisely for reasons of security, continuity and control. Airbus, today, is considering whether there is a credible European alternative to make the leap into the most sensitive segment.

The request for proposals with which Airbus will formally open the tender should start in early January 2026, with a decision expected before the summer. The duration would be up to ten years and the value is described as being in excess of EUR 50 million, with a specific focus on price predictability over the entire period (a typical theme in enterprise migrations, where uncertainty over costs and consumption can become a contractual trap). This figure, for a hyperscaler such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, is not gigantic in absolute terms, but it is gigantic for what it represents, because whoever wins does not just win a customer, but an industrial and political precedent.

Jestin's most quoted phrase is '80/20', i.e.about an 80 per cent probability of finding a European solution that really meets the needs. Translated: Airbus wants to do it, but is not sure that the European offer - in terms of scale, service maturity, geographical coverage, resilience and application portfolio - is ready to handle workloads of this complexity without compromise.