If you have already accepted that your next cloud move is to an EU-sovereign provider, the next question is the harder one: which one. OVHcloud, STACKIT, T Cloud Public, and Scaleway are all genuinely European, all outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act, and all credible at enterprise scale. They are also very different from each other in ways that matter for your specific workload, your team, and your compliance perimeter. This article gives workload-based recommendations rather than a generic feature matrix, and it makes calls. For background on why EU sovereignty matters in 2026 and what the legal stakes actually are, see our pillar guide on EU sovereign cloud migration. For a plain-English explanation of what the CLOUD Act actually compels and why selecting an EU region inside AWS or Azure does not resolve your GDPR exposure, see The CLOUD Act Problem: Why Your AWS EU Region Is Not GDPR-Safe.
The shortlist: why these four
The European cloud market has more than four providers, but for a CTO running an enterprise migration in 2026, four names cover almost every realistic shortlist. OVHcloud, STACKIT, T Cloud Public, and Scaleway are all incorporated under EU law, all governed exclusively by EU courts, all GDPR-compliant by design, and all available at the scale and operational maturity that an enterprise procurement process requires. They share a CLOUD Act exemption that no US hyperscaler can credibly offer regardless of region configuration. Hetzner and IONOS are also worth knowing about — Hetzner for raw price-performance and IONOS for pragmatic mid-market workloads — but both are better suited to SMB and developer use cases than to large enterprise migration programmes with complex compliance requirements. The four below are what serious enterprise shortlists look like in 2026.
OVHcloud (France)
OVHcloud is the largest EU-native cloud provider in the world. It is French-incorporated under Groupe OVH, runs more than 40 data centres across Europe, and serves 1.6 million customers across 140 countries. It is the closest thing the EU has to a hyperscaler-shaped catalogue under European law.
OVHcloud is strongest where workload diversity is high and you want a single provider to cover bare metal, managed Kubernetes, private cloud, object storage, GPU compute, and traditional virtual machines without stitching together multiple vendors. It is also the strongest EU-native option for VMware and Nutanix migrations: OVHcloud is a Pinnacle-tier Broadcom Advantage partner and a Nutanix Champion Service Provider, which matters a great deal in 2026 as enterprises continue to move workloads off VMware in response to Broadcom’s licensing changes.
On compliance, OVHcloud holds ISO 27001, HDS for French healthcare data, full GDPR alignment, and is a founding member of Gaia-X. The honest limitation worth flagging is the Canadian entity question. OVHcloud has a Canadian subsidiary, and a 2024 Ontario court case demonstrated that the entity could be compelled by non-EU courts under specific circumstances. For most workloads this is not material — the European entity is contractually distinct and the data never touches the Canadian footprint — but for SEAL 4 or maximum-sensitivity workloads, the precise contracting entity and data handling scope is something to verify with legal counsel before signing. Pricing is mid-market and competitive against the hyperscalers, but be aware that OVHcloud has announced 9–11% price increases across the catalogue from April 2026, driven by RAM and storage supply chain pressures from AI demand.
T Cloud Public (Germany)
T Cloud Public is the public cloud offering of T-Systems International GmbH, the enterprise IT subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. It is German-incorporated, runs EU-staff-only operations, and was rebranded from Open Telekom Cloud in January 2026. It is the provider you choose when regulatory exposure is the dominant constraint.
T Cloud Public is strongest for regulated industries where compliance depth is non-negotiable: financial services under DORA, healthcare, automotive, public sector, and German federal government workloads. The defining credential is BSI C5, the strictest cloud security certification in Europe and a mandatory requirement for German federal cloud procurement. Forrester rates T Cloud Public a Leader in European cloud, ISG rates it a Leader in the German market, and the wider compliance stack — ISO 27001, GDPR, NIS2 alignment, DORA-compliant configurations for financial services — is comprehensive in a way that few other providers can match.
The honest limitation is that T Cloud Public is the most enterprise-formal of the four. Procurement cycles are longer, pricing is higher, and the developer experience is noticeably less fluid than OVHcloud or Scaleway. This is not the cloud you choose for a fast-moving engineering team that wants to provision its own infrastructure on a Tuesday afternoon. It is the cloud you choose when a regulator, an auditor, or a procurement officer needs to see specific certifications on the contract. Pricing is premium, negotiated at enterprise contract level, and is justified for workloads where the BSI C5 credential is itself a procurement requirement. For everything else, you are paying for compliance you do not need.
STACKIT (Germany)
STACKIT is the cloud provider of the Schwarz Group — the parent of Lidl and Kaufland and Europe’s largest retailer. It is German-incorporated, runs out of data centres in Germany and Austria with a fifth currently under construction, and has been the fastest-growing EU-native cloud provider through 2025 and into 2026. It is the most interesting provider in the European market right now.
STACKIT is strongest for mid-to-large enterprises that need a broad managed services stack — managed Kubernetes, managed PostgreSQL and MariaDB, message queues, object storage, AI model serving — alongside the kind of enterprise software integrations that determine whether a procurement actually closes. STACKIT has built native integrations for ServiceNow, Salesforce and Tableau, and SAP, and the integration depth has been the differentiator for DACH-region enterprises and for any organisation already operating inside the Schwarz Group ecosystem. The pace of product development has been notable: STACKIT shipped seven product updates in six weeks in early 2026, which is a hyperscaler-style cadence rather than a legacy European telco one.
Compliance-wise, STACKIT holds BSI C5, ISO 27001, full GDPR alignment, and Gaia-X membership. The honest limitation is that the partner and integrator ecosystem outside the DACH region is still maturing. English-language documentation and support improved significantly in 2025 and is now genuinely enterprise-grade, but the depth of local partners, training material, and community resources is not yet at the level of OVHcloud or T Cloud Public for organisations operating primarily in non-German markets. Pricing is mid-market, individually negotiated for enterprise contracts, and the value calculation is particularly strong for managed services compared to building equivalent stacks on a hyperscaler.
Scaleway (France)
Scaleway is the cloud provider of Iliad Group, French-incorporated, with data centres in France, the Netherlands, and Poland. It is the developer-first EU-native cloud, and in 2026 it is the right answer for one specific use case more clearly than any other provider on this list.
Scaleway is strongest for GPU and AI inference workloads that need full EU legal protection. The independent Callista benchmark from February 2026 found Scaleway delivers approximately 4.8x the compute value per euro of AWS for equivalent workloads — the strongest price/performance ratio of any EU-native provider for compute-intensive use cases, and a meaningful number when GPU costs are the dominant line item in your AI infrastructure budget. Scaleway is also strong for managed Kubernetes, serverless functions, and managed databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL), and the developer experience is the best of the four providers here. If you are asking your engineers to migrate away from the AWS console, Scaleway is the migration that will generate the fewest internal complaints.
Compliance includes GDPR, HDS for French healthcare, and ISO 27001 in progress. The honest limitation is operational sovereignty at the management plane. A 2025 Xomnia analysis flagged that parts of Scaleway’s own management console infrastructure rely on US-based services. For the vast majority of enterprise workloads this is not a disqualifying issue — your data and compute are EU-resident and EU-controlled — but for public sector, defence, or workloads that require operational sovereignty at every layer of the stack, this is something to verify in detail before committing. Pricing is the value end of the market: significantly below hyperscaler pricing, with the 4.8x compute value per euro figure as the headline.
Workload-based decision guide
The provider you choose should be determined by what you are running, not by which logo looks best on a slide. Here is how to decide.
For financial services and any workload subject to DORA, choose T Cloud Public first. BSI C5 is mandatory or effectively mandatory across most German and increasingly broader European procurement frameworks for financial infrastructure, and T Cloud Public is the most established provider with the credential. STACKIT is the strong second option — also BSI C5, with deeper managed services and a more modern operating model — and is the right choice when you need DORA compliance without the enterprise-formal procurement experience.
For healthcare, the right answer depends on jurisdiction. OVHcloud is HDS-certified and is the natural choice for French healthcare data and pan-European health workloads that need HDS specifically. T Cloud Public is the right call for German healthcare, particularly for hospital systems and statutory health insurers operating under German federal compliance frameworks. STACKIT works well for general health-adjacent data — research, analytics, operational systems — that does not require HDS specifically.
For AI and GPU compute workloads, choose Scaleway. No other EU-native provider matches the GPU offering or the price/performance ratio for inference and training workloads in 2026. OVHcloud is the sensible backup if you are already using OVHcloud for the rest of your workloads and want to avoid running a second provider for AI specifically.
For Kubernetes-heavy and cloud-native workloads, the choice depends on what else you need. STACKIT is the right answer for enterprises that need managed services depth alongside Kubernetes — managed databases, message queues, integrations into the enterprise software stack. OVHcloud is the answer when you need breadth across many service types simultaneously and want a single contract. Scaleway is the answer for developer teams whose decision criteria are experience and cost.
For VMware and Nutanix migrations, OVHcloud is the only realistic answer. Pinnacle-tier Broadcom Advantage partner status and Nutanix Champion Service Provider designation make it the strongest EU-native landing zone for organisations moving off VMware in the wake of Broadcom’s pricing changes, which are continuing to drive migration projects in 2026.
For public sector and government workloads, choose T Cloud Public. BSI C5, EU-staff-only operations, Deutsche Telekom institutional backing, and the procurement-readiness profile align with how European public sector buyers actually source cloud. STACKIT is the strong second option for public sector workloads that do not specifically require BSI C5.
For multi-workload enterprise migrations with mixed requirements, the answer is usually a two-provider architecture. OVHcloud as the primary, on the strength of its catalogue breadth, with T Cloud Public or STACKIT for the regulated subset that requires BSI C5. This is the most common pattern Looming Tech sees in practice for large enterprises with diverse compliance perimeters, and it converts the sovereignty migration into a procurement story that finance, legal, and engineering can all sign off on.
What none of them have yet — honest gaps versus hyperscalers
It is worth being direct about what you give up. The managed services ecosystem, third-party integrations, and AI platform depth of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are still ahead of any EU-native provider. The gap is narrowing fast — STACKIT’s seven-updates-in-six-weeks cadence is one signal, OVHcloud’s continued AI service rollout is another — but if your current architecture depends on a deep stack of hyperscaler-native managed services (Bedrock, Vertex AI, Step Functions, EventBridge, Cosmos DB, the long tail of AWS data services), you should plan for some re-architecture rather than pure lift-and-shift. The work is bounded and the trade-off is usually worth it, but presenting the migration as zero-effort is the fastest way to lose engineering trust early in the project.
The multi-cloud transition approach
For most large enterprises in 2026, the pragmatic path is not a clean cutover. It is a phased multi-cloud approach: EU-native providers for regulated and sensitive workloads, hyperscalers for non-sensitive workloads during the transition window, and a target architecture that gradually shifts the centre of gravity across the next twelve to eighteen months. This is what most analysts are now recommending explicitly for 2026, and it is what we see working in practice with clients. The key discipline is to treat multi-cloud as a bridge rather than a destination — long-term dual operational overhead is expensive and erodes the sovereignty benefit you set out to achieve in the first place.
How Looming Tech can help
Looming Tech is an EU-headquartered technology company, registered in Bulgaria, with a UK office and 50+ engineers. We are part of the Eastvantage Group, are pursuing ISO 27001 certification, and are a registered partner with OVHcloud, STACKIT, Scaleway, and T Cloud Public. We help European enterprises shortlist the right EU-sovereign provider for their actual workloads — not the one with the loudest sales motion — and execute the migration end to end. If you are 60 to 90 days from a provider decision, or if you need a workload assessment to anchor the conversation, we are happy to have a no-commitment call.