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Although AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform operate data centres within the European Union, some governance and legal jurisdiction continue to remain in the United States.
Hosting data in an EU data centre does not place it beyond the reach of US jurisdiction.
This principle, that legal control rather than physical location determines access, has led European regulators and privacy authorities to question whether reliance on US cloud infrastructure is compatible with European data protection frameworks.
Since the shift from on-prem infrastructure to cloud computing, the global cloud market has been dominated by US-based hyperscale providers.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform control the vast majority of cloud infrastructure and platform services worldwide, particularly in Europe.
Estimates place their combined share of the European cloud infrastructure market at over ninety percent.
European alternatives exist, but none have matched the scale, ecosystem depth, pricing power, or platform lock-in of the US hyperscalers.
As a result, most organisations have little practical choice but to rely on US-based cloud providers, thereby becoming subject to US legal regimes and surveillance authorities.
The implications for data sovereignty and security are significant.
Two pieces of US legislation are of primary concern: the CLOUD Act and FISA Section 702.
The CLOUD Act allows US authorities to compel a US service provider to produce data within its possession, custody, or control, regardless of where that data is physically stored.
Hosting data in an EU data centre does not remove it from the reach of US jurisdiction.
Alongside the CLOUD Act, FISA Section 702 mandates assistance from electronic communications and cloud service providers in the collection of foreign intelligence.
Providers are generally prohibited from disclosing the existence or details of such assistance.
European courts and regulators have repeatedly identified Section 702 as incompatible with European fundamental rights standards, particularly in relation to proportionality, oversight, and the lack of effective judicial redress for non-US persons.
Despite this, the underlying legal frameworks remain in place.
Taken together, US cloud dominance, the CLOUD Act, FISA Section 702, and increasingly strained EU–US relations present a serious challenge to European data sovereignty.
Organisations relying on US hyperscale providers face persistent conflicts between EU data protection law, which emphasises necessity, proportionality, and accountability, and US law, which prioritises access to data held by US companies irrespective of storage location.
These conflicts affect not only personal data under the GDPR but also commercially sensitive information, government systems, and critical infrastructure.
One way to reduce exposure is to ensure that no complete, intelligible dataset exists in any single location or under the control of any single provider.
Binarii Labs technology encrypts, duplicates and fragments data across three separate locations, with each location storing incomplete encrypted fragments of the data and completely unusable on its own.
Under this model, unwanted access to any individual storage endpoint exposes only incomplete cryptographic fragments.
Reconstruction of the underlying data from a single endpoint is mathematically impossible, shifting data protection away from reliance on jurisdictional assurances and towards structural and mathematical constraints.