News commentary

Digital sovereignty isn't just a buzzword – it's the future

The Register · Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols · last updated

Linux Foundation Europe boss predicts EU will run as fast as it can from US tech companies

You want to know who’s even sicker of President Donald Trump than American liberals? European governments and companies who are realizing that putting all their eggs in one US basket was a stupid move.

That came loud and clear last month in Amsterdam at KubeCon Europe 2026.

In the Netherlands’ capital, everyone was talking about digital sovereignty. Heck, there was a sold-out Open Sovereign Cloud Day at the conference’s start. It wasn’t just there, though. Digital sovereignty was almost as hot a topic at the show as AI. The subject came up in the keynotes, the hallway track, and vendor booths.

Why? In a lunch interview, Thierry Carrez, general manager of Linux Foundation Europe, explained that while technologies like confidential computing can stop cloud providers from reading data by encrypting data in memory, there’s no tech answer if the Trump administration insists on an American company flipping the kill switch on your email, your office software, or even access to your US-hosted data.

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