Airbus Dumps AWS for French Cloud Scaleway Over US Spying Fears
Geopolitical paranoia and American surveillance laws are finally hitting Big Tech where it hurts: the European corporate wallet. Big planes don't want foreign eyes on their blueprints anymore.
European aerospace giant Airbus kicked off a tender early this year to migrate 70 mission-critical enterprise applications off AWS and onto the infrastructure of French cloud operator Scaleway. The workload being transplanted includes core enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), customer management (CRM), and product lifecycle tools (PLM).
Moving sensitive defense and industrial software wasn't a casual decision, especially given that European cloud providers lack the staggering scale of American tech behemoths. Yet Airbus Chief Digital Officer Catherine Jestin highlighted that Scaleway won the bid by pitching a strong technology stack alongside competitive commercial terms.
This migration is only a slice of the pie, as Airbus still hosts over 900 applications on AWS in total. High-profile aviation analytics systems like Skywise and the tech support tool Case Management Assistant are remaining strictly on AWS, while corporate tools from Salesforce, Coupa, and Workday stay put as well.
The primary driver behind this costly reshuffle is protection against extraterritorial jurisdiction like the US CLOUD Act, which permits American federal authorities to subpoena data stored by American companies regardless of server location. Friction escalated further under President Donald Trump, pushing EU leaders to question their total reliance on foreign data centers. Adding fuel to the fire, a senior Microsoft executive recently conceded in a French courtroom that American hyperscalers simply cannot legally guarantee full immunity from US data requests.
This cloud exit reflects a broader European movement toward digital independence, with France pushing state PCs to Linux and EU officials tinkering with an "EU OS" initiative built on Fedora Linux.
The dream of complete digital sovereignty is finding its ultimate test in the messy reality of global IT infrastructure. Watching massive corporations play geopolitical hopscotch between cloud providers exposes the glaring gap between political ambitions and actual tech independence.
Source: Register
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