A study paid for by a tech lobby group says the EU's proposed cloud sovereignty law could cost Europe €115bn over 10 years.
The law is the Cloud and AI Development Act, or CADA. The study comes from ECIPE, a Brussels think tank, and Matthias Bauer wrote it. The €115bn is its central estimate. CCIA Europe, a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, paid for the work.
Spread evenly, the total comes to about €11.5bn a year. That sounds large, but a figure like this stands or falls on its assumptions: which parts of the act get counted, what the law is compared against, and whether the costs land on businesses, public bodies or both. Those inputs decide whether €115bn works as a forecast or as an opening bid, and the headline number alone does not say which.
Commissioned studies are a familiar tool in Brussels policy fights, and a think tank's authorship does not change who paid. Cloud sovereignty, the idea that European data and workloads should sit under European control, has been a running argument in EU digital policy for years. A law built around that idea invites exactly this kind of cost-of-regulation counterpunch.
The more interesting test is the missing column. Supporters of sovereignty rules would say that staying dependent on foreign providers carries costs of its own, and a fair comparison would have to price those too. Whether anyone publishes a rival estimate that does, and shows its working, is what will decide if the €115bn figure shapes the debate or just starts it.