Britain has no locally owned and operated cloud provider. UKCloud, the last one standing, went into liquidation in 2022.

This is not a minor gap in the market. It is an existential threat.

The numbers

Hyperscale US providers currently account for 48% of the London data centre market. By 2027, that figure is projected to reach 66%.

The UK Ministry of Defence just signed a £400 million deal with Google Cloud for what it calls "sovereign" infrastructure. The word has lost all meaning.

The admission

In June 2025, Microsoft told the French Senate it cannot guarantee the sovereignty of European data. UK public sector data in Microsoft cloud could be processed in more than 100 countries.

This is not dependency like a narcotic — something that sustains a habit and causes withdrawal. This is carcinogenic. It actively destroys: swallowing smaller local players, offshoring income, concentrating control in an ever-increasing exponent.

What now

For UK businesses, the options are:

1. Accept the risk and hope US policy remains friendly
2. Look to EU providers — Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway — and accept the post-Brexit irony
3. Build internal capability and wait for a UK alternative that may never come

None of these are comfortable. But pretending the problem does not exist is worse.

eigeninfra helps European businesses assess their US cloud exposure and plan realistic migration paths. Book a consultation to start the conversation.