Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
Airbus is preparing an RFP to migrate mission-critical internal systems — ERP, manufacturing execution, CRM, and product lifecycle management for aircraft designs — from on-prem to a “sovereign” European cloud. The motivation isn’t just modernization: Airbus wants strong assurances that sensitive aerospace data remains under European control, especially as major vendors (like SAP) increasingly ship net-new capabilities primarily (or only) on their cloud platforms.
The Register frames it as a sovereignty stress test for Europe’s cloud ecosystem. Airbus is reportedly targeting a long-term contract (up to ten years) and believes it’s only an “80/20” chance it can find a provider that meets both technical requirements and regulatory expectations around exposure to US extraterritorial laws (for example, data access requests under the CLOUD Act). Even US hyperscalers’ “sovereign cloud” offerings may not fully satisfy those constraints, and Airbus is also concerned about whether European providers have enough scale to run workloads of this size and criticality.