Cordero Management
The 2030 sovereignty horizon · interactive thesis

What does European digital sovereignty actually look like in 2030?

Three trajectories. Six measurable dimensions. One decision being made — whether your board has made it deliberately or not. Pick a scenario below to see what the European digital stack looks like at the end of this decade.

€264B
Annual EU outflow to foreign digital technology providers
97%
Of European cloud infrastructure held by non-European providers
4–10×
Hyperscaler cost premium over European sovereign alternatives
€300B
Investment required by 2035 to close the structural gap (EuroStack)
Select a trajectory

Three scenarios. One choice your board is already making.

Each scenario represents a set of decisions the European enterprise and policy coalition could make between now and 2030. None is utopian; none is catastrophic. The difference between them is measurable, and the gap between them is the cost of the posture you choose.

KPI radar · 2030 projection
Horizon 1 · Default drift

By 2030, Europe has 2026's problems — just bigger.

Cost outflow to foreign providers reaches €340 billion annually. Hyperscaler cloud concentration rises past 97%. NIS2 enforcement produces the first headline director prosecutions. European AI remains dependent on US frontier models, with EU inference compute running predominantly on AWS Bedrock and Azure.

The sovereignty conversation has moved from boardrooms to courtrooms. Regulators issue fines. Directors face personal liability. Procurement departments discover that late-stage sovereignty migrations cost 3–5× what proactive ones did in 2026–2028. The organisations that waited end up paying premium to whoever the surviving European suppliers turn out to be.

€340B
2030 EU digital outflow
97%+
Non-EU cloud share
The evidence under the model

This simulation is directional. The data behind it is not.

Every number driving the KPI radar above is drawn from named, public, defensible sources. The Cordero view is opinionated; the evidence base is not. A representative sample of what the model rests on:

€10M
Personal director fines under NIS2
Essential entities, €10M or 2% global turnover. Article 20. Individual directors personally liable. Member State transpositions live since Oct 2024; German BSI Act amended Dec 2025.
4–10×
AWS / Azure vs European sovereign cost
Like-for-like compute, published benchmarks. VPSBenchmarks, umh.app, DanubeData 2024–2026. UK CMA: Microsoft licensing terms add 20–30% on non-Azure infrastructure.
78%
B2B buyers screening for sovereignty
Edelman Trust survey, 2025. 78% of B2B decision-makers cite data sovereignty as meaningful in supplier selection. BCG 2025: 26% conversion uplift on certified sovereign providers.
€15M / yr
Schleswig-Holstein savings
On €9M one-time investment. 30,000 civil servants migrated off Microsoft; another 30,000 to follow. Payback period under one year, before sovereignty value counted.
300 qubits
IQM superconducting quantum to VTT
150-qubit system delivered mid-2026, 300-qubit late 2027. Most superconducting qubits procured anywhere globally. Integrated with LUMI supercomputer in Kajaani, Finland.
€830M
Mistral Series B, early 2026
Largest European AI infrastructure financing without US venture capital. Signals the capital stack is viable at frontier scale — when the coalition chooses to fund it.
Q2 2026
EU Quantum Act expected
Mirrors the Chips Act structure. Creates funding instruments for European quantum ecosystem. Aligned with eIDAS 2 (end 2026 digital ID wallet mandate) and CADA (Cloud and AI Development Act, in legislative process).
Cloud Act
ICC prosecutor incident, 2025
Microsoft suspended an ICC prosecutor's email account following US sanctions. Microsoft confirmed under oath that EU customer data on EU infrastructure remains subject to US access requests. Operational, not theoretical.
A conversation Cordero is prepared to have

The simulation is a hypothesis. Your position on it is a decision.

If the argument here resonates, the next step is not to read another document. It is a 45-minute conversation — free, confidential, no commercial commitment — to understand where your organisation sits on the horizon, and what the first defensible move looks like.