A counterpoint to American public clouds is sorely needed. For organizations seeking sovereignty, their inquiry into this can reach T-Systems, which, with T Cloud, has been providing a mature, European-based alternative for a decade. What does this entail, and how significant is the decision to choose this cloud?
With 24 data centers and a strong presence in Northwest Europe, T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom, is not content to rest on its laurels. During T Cloud Day in The Hague, large arrows on a map of the continent illustrate that the company’s ambitions extend from its centralized concentration in northwestern Europe to the southwest as well as to the north. Organizations seeking greater cloud and AI sovereignty may be eagerly anticipating the rise of this cloud provider. But there’s no sign of hubris, as evidenced by a statement from Emily Glastra, Managing Director of T-Systems Netherlands. “We’re big enough to scale globally and small enough to care locally.”
Not ‘cloud-like,’ but the cloud
We sometimes view propositions that promise a “cloud-like” experience with some frustration when critical features you’d expect from a public cloud are missing. Any IT environment can be described as a cloud, but by no means is every one actually one. T Cloud sounds like a new solution, but it’s a new name as of 2026 for a solution that has existed since 2016 under the name Open Telekom Cloud. It’s younger than AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, but nonetheless a well-established infrastructure.
Parent company Deutsche Telekom has been around for quite some time and, as a telco, has been accustomed to providing services on a large scale since the 1990s. And, as Glastra emphasizes, it is well-versed in compliance and data sovereignty. The latter topic is a “hot topic,” and during T Cloud Day, the term “sovereignty” and its derivatives come up frequently. Often, it isn’t even T-Systems that brings it up.
Guest speaker Werner Vissers, for example, hammers home this point. He is the Manager of Operations & Security at ICT Rijk van Nijmegen and speaks of the misconception that a data center in Europe is automatically a European data center. The U.S. CLOUD Act can always compel a U.S. company to hand over data, with only contractual promises, such as “Bring-Your-Own-Keys” or air-gapped solutions, intended to lend credibility to the arrangement. Geography, it turns out, is not adequate protection. But T Cloud’s German origins are. Far-reaching U.S. data legislation does not apply to European data in that context.
What is sovereignty, really?
Glastra highlights the multifaceted nature of this advantage. Data and legal sovereignty ensure that access to sensitive data is properly regulated. Operational sovereignty, that is, “who is in control of the infrastructure?”, is also safeguarded on one’s own continent. And let’s not forget technological sovereignty, perhaps the most challenging puzzle. It’s important to recognize that no one’s tech stack is both high-performing and 100 percent European. Chips, switches, routers, and all kinds of software layers are, after all, mostly non-European. Still, Glastra argues that a euro spent in Europe is worth more and ultimately benefits the entire ecosystem.
“No one was losing sleep over sovereignty 10 years ago,” Glastra notes. Even without that explicit concern, T Cloud grew to 4,000 customers and manages infrastructure for major clients. Interestingly, T-Systems is very open about its own cloud usage, since it is, of course, its own customer. However, as Thomas Weber, Vice President of T Cloud at T-Systems International, explains, the company also purchases cloud services from other providers.
Deutsche Telekom itself has opted for a multicloud strategy. The company runs 10 percent of its own workloads on-premises, Weber explains. These include the most critical, data-sensitive operations, which are safeguarded by this restrictive setup. Thirty percent of IT workloads are hosted in the company’s own T Cloud. In the Netherlands, for example, these are hosted in NorthC’s data centers. This partnership has been in place for years and provides the redundancy and maturity required for a public cloud. It’s a mix of hardware and software. Again, for the latter, an additional layer of control is required for certain data. However, 60 percent of Deutsche Telekom’s IT usage is spread across the “usual suspects,” AWS, Azure, and GCP. This is the reality for many large companies, but we rarely get such a clear picture. Each cloud has its own advantages, such as exclusive models, native tooling, and integrations with partner solutions.
No more digital colony
Nearly two years ago, prominent politician Mario Draghi issued a warning. Europe was portrayed as a digital colony, with up to 80 percent of the digital products, infrastructure, and IP used by Europeans originating from outside Europe. Björn Weidenmüller, SVP AI Factory Go-To-Market at T Systems, tells us that the most logical step from an American cloud is to move to T Cloud. There are several reasons for this. He suggests that his company is three years ahead of the European competition when it comes to functionality. In an interview with Techzine, he outlines a three-pronged set of considerations that includes not only functionality but also sovereignty and costs. If you fail on one front, you’ll have to work very hard on the other levels.
T Cloud has come a long way, but not as far as the major hyperscalers, Weidenmüller admits. Despite having 4,000 customers and no major incidents, there is 80 percent “feature parity” with AWS. The Amazon cloud has many features, the vast majority of which the customer base is nowhere near using to their full potential. Nevertheless, you have to keep up in terms of functionality, he concludes based on customer conversations. A balance is needed. Sovereignty alone is not enough.
That doesn’t mean T Cloud has to build everything from scratch. Through partners like NorthC, the scope within its current core area is much broader than it would have been at this stage otherwise. It’s easy to imagine that such an approach could be expanded to more regions.
An AI solution
Say the word “sovereign,” and a host of European IT providers will rush to you. Tell them you have ambitious AI plans, and most of them will back off. T Cloud, however, has had a fully-fledged AI Factory since February. 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are running in Munich and were deployed there within half a year. This involved an existing data center that, in one fell swoop, increased Germany’s AI capacity by 50 percent, namely 30 megawatts.
Many companies talk about AI plans, but Weidenmuller cites a fitting English saying: “cross the river by feeling the stones.” In other words: no matter how ambitious and unparalleled the AI expansion may have been, T-Systems’ approach is relatively cautious. The goal is to eventually deliver 100,000 GPUs in a so-called Gigafactory, but at the European level, the current infrastructure already represents a major leap forward.
You’d think every AI player would immediately pick up the phone if GPUs were available for rent somewhere. Nevertheless, Weidenmüller tells us that as a cloud provider, you really need to be able to explain the use case to customers. Many want to do something with AI, but don’t know what, how, or why a certain scale is necessary. Certainly in Europe, we aren’t blessed with a long list of AI labs.
Weidenmüller applauds all parties that, like T Cloud, are working on a European AI infrastructure. There’s clearly no cutthroat competition here, but rather a lack of players like T-Systems. Meanwhile, use cases are growing, he explains. First came Retrieval-Augmented Generation and enterprise search to quickly help organizations adopt internal AI tools. Now digital twins, physical AI, and industrial agents have been added to the mix, and more. Collaboration with NVIDIA is often helpful in this regard. That company’s Omniverse suite helps organizations digitize their factories, verify designs in advance, and make automation a success. Aligning the digital domain with the physical reality it’s meant to emulate is quite challenging, but with enough computing power, expertise, and support in both hardware and software, it can be a success.
Conclusion: The cloud in all dimensions
As mentioned, T-Systems says it is not yet at the level of the absolute world leaders. However, as Europe’s“number one,” there is much to be said for this cloud provider. On this continent, there are many weak links in the IT chain; for example, aside from Mistral, there is no notable LLM developer, and even that French company is never found at the top of the AI benchmarks where OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Chinese open-weight models rank. So there is work to be done.
Incidents such as blocking access to Claude Fable 5 for non-Americans highlight a looming problem for Europe. To be precise, that exclusion of non-U.S. users was the crux of the U.S. government’s order in the interest of national security, but Anthropic was unable to enforce this policy and decided to block access to the model entirely worldwide. Let this be a lesson for European IT decision-makers, just as it was when Microsoft had to admit in a French court that it could not guarantee full sovereignty for European customers.
The positive aspect is that T Cloud isn’t solely defined by such issues. You shouldn’t choose this cloud service purely because it’s European. Instead, organizations need to manage their IT environments more consciously, with some workloads remaining on-premises and others placed in the cloud. But which ones? At Deutsche Telekom, that also depends on multiple factors. One X-factor could be sovereignty, as well as locally available GPUs, a lack of vendor lock-in thanks to an open foundation, and a decade of proven services.
Read also: Digital sovereignty: from idealistic theory to real-world practice