European startups are often criticised for not being ambitious enough — but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for evroc.
The Swedish startup, which has just raised a €13m pre-seed round, wants to take on a goliath of the tech world: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Over the next two years, it plans to raise €3bn — that averages out as €125m a month for everyone keeping score at home — to develop and operate two hyperscale data centres in Europe. By 2028, evroc wants to have established eight data centres and three software development hubs and employ 3,000 people on the continent.
“You have to be a bit crazy to do something like this,” says founder Mattias Åström.
But if evroc can reach its goal — to build a cloud provider that’s both greener and more sensitive to data privacy than the American giants — the prize would be huge.
The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe
Today, only 13% of the computer storage in Europe is provided by European companies. According to Åström, US-based AWS has about 30% of the European market. The biggest European provider, Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud, holds 1-2% of the market.
That’s bad for the European economy — but it’s also a problem for data privacy.
“Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens. That means that many companies and authorities in Europe cannot put sensitive data on the American cloud and instead store it on servers in the cellar,” Åström says.
The European Commission has recently fined both AWS and Facebook-owner Meta €746m and €1.2bn respectively for moving European user data across to the US — which breaks the EU’s GDPR law.
“The lack of home-grown hyperscale cloud providers poses a serious challenge for Europe. Not only because of citizens’ data, but it also poses a real threat to our long-term competitiveness in a digital world where others are advancing much faster,” Åström says.
It’s a problem that the increasingly tech sovereignty-obsessed EU is now taking seriously. Cloud computing is a key objective in the European Commission’s Data Strategy, Digital Strategy and Industrial Strategy and also in the EU recovery
