European organizations face critical cloud sovereignty challenges with AI-powered app development. Learn how to maintain control over data, ensure GDPR compliance, and avoid vendor lock-in while innovating with AI.
Three American companies control 70% of Europe's cloud market. While this statistic has been cited in policy papers and industry reports for years, most European enterprises treated it as background noise. Cloud services were convenient, state-of-the-art, and for most practical purposes, worked absolutely fine. It's almost like we simply ignored the fire, that's been burning since the world's been turning.
Then there was a rapid shift in the geopolitical climate. Regulations such as the US CLOUD Act made it clear that data stored by American companies, regardless of where it is stored, can be compelled by US authorities. European regulations like GDPR, NIS2, and DORA raised the stakes for non-compliance. And organizations were faced with the uncomfortable question: Do we actually control our digital infrastructure?
This is the essence of cloud sovereignty: the ability to decide where your applications run, who can access your data, and whether you can operate independently of outside legal and business decisions. What once seemed like a vague policy concern is now a boardroom-level strategic problem.
And just as European enterprises are grappling with these challenges, AI-powered development tools are transforming how applications are built, adding new layers of complexity to an already convoluted sovereignty puzzle.
When innovation turns into dependency
The rise of AI-powered development platforms promises to democratize application development, allowing users (with or without developer training) to describe what they want in natural language while AI generates the code. It's transformative technology, but it raises some uncomfortable questions.
When an AI generates your application code, who owns that intellectual property? Where does that AI model actually run, and who has access to your prompts and generated code? If the AI model is trained on code from thousands of companies, what patterns are bleeding into your applications?
The platforms that organizations use to create their solutions can further compound these concerns. Many create applications that can only run on the vendor's infrastructure. Your entire application portfolio becomes inseparable from that vendor's business decisions. If they decide your region isn't profitable, raise prices dramatically, or get acquired by a company with different priorities, you're locked in.
This is the modern sovereignty paradox: The tools that promise to make you more agile can simultaneously make you more dependent.
The three layers of control
The European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework defines sovereignty across eight dimensions: from strategic and legal sovereignty to data protection, operational control, and §technology independence. But for practical decision-making, think of cloud sovereignty as three concentric circles:
The innermost circle is about national security. Applications dealing with classified information or critical infrastructure require on-premise deployment or private clouds operated exclusively by EU entities. No compromises.
The middle circle focuses on data sovereignty. These applications handle sensitive customer data, financial records, or health information. You need guarantees about data location, strong encryption, and clear legal frameworks preventing foreign access.
The outermost circle addresses regulatory compliance. Less sensitive workloads that must still comply with GDPR, NIS2, and industry-specific regulations. The key is ensuring your cloud provider adheres to European law and accepts liability for compliance failures.
The mistake many organizations make is treating all applications alike. The challenge is classifying your applications correctly and choosing platforms that can flex across these different requirements.
The legal reality: Geographic location isn't enough
The US CLOUD Act, adopted in 2018, mandates US service providers to preserve and produce data they control regardless of where it's stored. Simply hosting your data in a European data center doesn't protect it if the cloud provider is an American company.
Legal analysis conducted for the Dutch Cybersecurity Centre concludes that EU entities can only avoid the CLOUD Act if there's no corporate relation to any US company, or if a US-related company has no possession, custody, or control over EU-stored data.
Add to this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Defense Production Act, which can prioritize American needs over foreign customers. The legal landscape creates genuine vulnerabilities that geographic data location alone cannot solve.
The portability imperative
Here's a test for your current application development platform: Could you move your applications to different infrastructure tomorrow? Not in theory; in practice. Can you export the applications, deploy them elsewhere, and have them function?
For many organizations using proprietary platforms, the answer is no. The applications are trapped in formats only those vendors can support. This is vendor lock-in dressed up as innovation.
True sovereignty requires portability. Your applications should be built on open standards, technologies such as React for the interface and WebAssembly for the runtime logic, for instance. These proven technologies run anywhere. If your app is built on these foundations, you can host it on your own servers, a European cloud provider, or a hyperscaler when appropriate.
Modern low-code platforms designed with sovereignty in mind—like Betty Blocks—leverage these open standards to ensure your applications remain portable. With React export capabilities and WebAssembly compatibility, applications built on such platforms can be deployed across multi-cloud, hybrid, or on-premises environments without modification.
Portability isn't just a technical feature, it's your exit strategy. It's what prevents a vendor relationship from becoming a hostage situation.
AI sovereignty, the next frontier
As AI becomes integral to application development, a new dimension of sovereignty emerges. Most generative AI models are hosted by large technology companies and trained on data with unclear provenance. When you use these tools to build applications, your prompts get sent to external servers. The generated code might contain patterns or dependencies that create new lock-in. And you're dependent on that AI provider continuing to offer the service on acceptable terms.
The sovereignty solution is evaluating where AI processing happens and ensuring transparency in how AI-assisted features work. Enterprise-ready platforms should provide clear documentation about their AI capabilities—where models run, what data they access, and how they handle your intellectual property.
The same principle applies to AI-powered features within development platforms themselves. If a low-code platform uses AI to suggest application architectures or generate logic, where does that AI run? What data does it see? These questions matter as much as where your production data lives.
Building a sovereign strategy for app development
For European enterprises navigating this landscape, sovereignty isn't about rejecting cloud or AI, it's about retaining control while embracing innovation.
Start with classification. Build a framework that categorizes your applications by sovereignty requirements. Not everything needs maximum sovereignty, but critical systems certainly do.
Choose platforms, not point solutions. Look for development platforms that can meet different sovereignty requirements, on-premise for sensitive systems, European private cloud for the next tier, hyperscaler deployment for appropriate workloads. Platforms that combine enterprise-grade governance—like role-based access controls and governed development toolkits—with deployment flexibility give you both security and agility.
Demand portability. Any new application development platform should generate output you can take elsewhere. Test this before you commit.
Think hybrid. You will have some applications on-premise, others in European clouds, perhaps some in hyperscaler environments. Build the organizational capability to manage this complexity. Look for platforms that enable IT and business teams to co-create applications under full governance, reducing the backlog while maintaining control.
Consider the sovereignty premium. Sovereign solutions may cost more initially, but weigh that against regulatory fines (GDPR violations can reach 4% of global revenue), business disruption risks, and loss of competitive advantage.
The path forward
The convergence of AI and low-code development represents a genuine revolution in how enterprises build software. Applications that once took months can now be created in weeks. This is profoundly valuable.
But this revolution shouldn't require surrendering control. Modern platforms such as Betty Blocks demonstrate that you can deliver both rapid AI-powered development and genuine sovereignty. Through flexible deployment options (on-premise, private cloud, or multi-cloud), open standards (React and WebAssembly), and governed collaboration between IT and business teams, enterprises can build custom portals and applications with the look-and-feel of their brand—all while maintaining complete control over where and how their applications run.
The organizations that will thrive are those that move fast while maintaining autonomy. They'll adopt AI and low-code approaches that match their sovereignty requirements rather than compromising security for convenience.
As you evaluate platforms for building your next generation of applications, ask not just what they can build, but where they build it, who controls it, and whether you can truly call it your own. In an increasingly complex geopolitical environment, these questions aren't paranoia, they are part of strategy.
Cloud sovereignty isn't about building walls around European technology. It's about ensuring that European enterprises can innovate without creating dependencies that could be exploited, regulated away, or priced beyond reach. The tools exist to achieve both innovation and sovereignty. The question is whether your organization will choose to use them.
Betty Blocks offers flexible hosting options including on-premise and private cloud deployment, with support for React export and WebAssembly compatibility. Built on the SAFE framework (Secure and governed, AI-driven app generation, Flexible and open, Extensible and reusable), Betty Blocks ensures your applications remain under your control while leveraging modern AI-powered development capabilities.
