‘Kill Switch’ Fears Drive EU Tech Sovereignty Push
Military data sharing is becoming more important as battlefields are increasingly automated. Allies don’t just need intelligence these days, but torrents of operational data flowing to and from AI-enabled drones. War is now an IT game.
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At the same time, this is a time of unprecedented tension between the United States and its European allies. So it came as little surprise when, earlier this week, it emerged that the European Union is quietly planning to set up a secure military data-sharing platform – without U.S.-made technology.
According to a Euractiv report on a European Defense Agency presentation, the Defense Artificial Intelligence Data Space should be operational by 2030. The European Union has no military force, but the idea is to create interoperability between the bloc’s disparate military systems, reportedly based on a sovereign military cloud. The defense agency did not respond to a request for comment.
The new military data space was mentioned in European Commission plans published in November. Avoiding American cloud technology is a new twist – albeit one that slots in neatly with a wider push for independence from American tech, triggered by the hostility of the second Trump administration towards Europe and its perceived lack of reliability as a military ally (see: Europe’s Quest for a Domestic Alternative to US Hyperscalers).
Chatham House research associate Georgia Cole in June 2025 co-authored an article arguing that the EU and United Kingdom were “currently incapable of rapidly extricating themselves from U.S.-supplied infrastructure, even if they wanted to.” There were no viable alternatives, which could take decades to establish, she and co-author Isabella Wilkinson warned.
But discussions about the need for more European tech infrastructure have heavily accelerated in the intervening months, Cole told Information Security Media Group. “Countries are waking up to the really core dependencies that we have on the U.S. and the potential dangers of those within military and intelligence systems,” she said, emphasizing that these are her own opinions rather than those of Chatham House.
“One of the big concerns, for example, is kill switches within military infrastructure, whether that be drones or missiles or whatever. If U.S. companies cut off access to the cloud then they could stop those weapons, that infrastructure, from working,” she said. “Obviously that would be quite an extreme scenario, but one that is now within the realm of possibility, whereas it wasn’t really seen as that before.”
“There’s still a lot of debate about whether you can really replace the U.S. [cloud] systems,” Cole added, ‘but there’s more of a push towards that.”
There might be a serious capability tradeoff if Europe’s militaries do decide to forgo U.S. hyperscalers in favor of a more piecemeal collection of local providers – the region lacks any true cloud giants of its own. “With hyper scale, you typically get a high level of capability,” said Noah Sylvia, a research analyst at the Royal United Service Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London.
Smaller players will struggle to match that level of capability until they scale up, Sylvia said, suggesting that France’s increasingly local-led approach to government procurement might help to achieve this. But when speed of deployment and high capability are top priorities, as is the case with military procurement, European countries wanting to urgently turn to sovereign providers would need to figure out how to mitigate a short-term capability dip.
Of course, U.S. hyperscalers have also increasingly been trying to pitch themselves as plausible sovereign cloud providers in the European context, promising organizational and physical separations that should keep data safe from American political pressure.
This has largely been a pitch to EU businesses and public-sector organizations, but Amazon Web Services mentioned defense when launching its European Sovereign Cloud last month. Google’s sovereign Cloud Air-Gapped system is going to be used for the processing of the German armed forces’ protected data.
Claims of independence from U.S. pressure may be overstated. A 2018 U.S. law known as the Cloud Act allows American law enforcement to demand access to data stored on the overseas servers of U.S. providers. Microsoft France admitted last year in testimony to the French Senate that this meant it could only promise to “resist” unfounded requests. According to Cole, it is “not 100% clear” whether the hyperscalers can promise true European sovereignty in the military context.
“They are sort of indicating that they can, but I have my doubts around that,” she said. “Obviously we would need a sort of test case, but I think that’s something European countries should be very wary about. Unless they can change the company legal structure or something in a way that renders that data not subject to U.S. domestic laws, then I think that’s something that probably they can’t promise.”
Europe has recently been flexing its sovereignty muscles, to some extent. In late January, EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius – a big proponent of the “defragmentation” of the region’s forces – announced the operational start of Govsatcom, an encrypted, “sovereign” satellite communication system for EU governments and militaries.
That’s a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink. Dropping U.S. hyperscalers could be a far more politically explosive move.
“One thing it can be framed as is Europe taking control of its own defense, and that’s what President Trump wants. But then, obviously Trump wants Europe to take control of its own defense while also buying U.S. infrastructure and retaining that control,” said Cole.
“So that is a political sensitivity, and I think that’s why this isn’t something that’s been seriously discussed up until now. But now more and more people are considering that maybe that tradeoff is worth it. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think we’re still in that mindset of ‘No, let’s keep NATO together, let’s keep the U.S. involved.’ But we could very well get to a point where that’s not the priority anymore.”
There will be organizational challenges. “Everyone has different classification levels and policies around classification, and so what I consider secret you might consider sensitive,” said Sylvia. “Are we wanting to share that? What systems are going to be qualified to handle those requests?”
The EU plan would be very expensive, Cole noted, adding that “trying to get every European country to come together and agree on something” could prove equally challenging. Also, the data center buildout that is required could lead to environmental impacts that trigger public pushback. Europe’s mania for regulation may be a problem, particularly when dealing with the private sector.
But despite the challenges, Sylvia said, the news of the EU data-sharing platform is politically significant. “It is interesting that this sovereignty push has been ongoing for a while, but it only really started to take shape, people really started to feel a sense of urgency, when everything was blowing up around Greenland,” he said. “I personally found it a little surprising that that was the line that did it for everyone.”