This opinion piece, written by Fermín Manzanedo, co-founder and CISO/COO of Transparent Edge, examines why digital sovereignty has stopped being an academic debate and become a priority in European boardrooms. Manzanedo notes that more than 90% of European data is controlled by US companies, and breaks the problem down into three strands for any business: the jurisdictional strand (the US Cloud Act obliges providers subject to its law to hand over data even when it sits in a European data centre), the operational strand (a political decision can change the cost or availability of a service that underpins a company’s infrastructure overnight), and the strategic strand (whoever controls the infrastructure decides how data is managed and which AI models get trained).
The column also reviews the framework already in place to respond — the European Commission’s ‘Cloud Sovereignty Framework’ and the ‘Accelerating Digital Sovereignty in Spain’ roadmap — and argues that Spain already has its own ecosystem and technology (edge computing, fibre, supercomputers such as MareNostrum) to offer real alternatives to the hyperscalers. Manzanedo concludes that choosing European providers is not a matter of patriotism, but of risk management.
