Mounting geopolitical pressures have made digital sovereignty an everyday talking point as organizations and individuals seek more autonomy from any foreign government dependency and potential influence. Whilst realistically there won’t be a brand-new sovereign tech market, we are witnessing the emergence of new sovereign options and technology choices that will shape a new sovereign tech landscape in smaller incremental steps over the next 5 to 10 years. Recent indications of this changing landscape became evident as:
- A German state turns its back to Microsoft’s suite. In less than three months, the majority of civil servants, police officers, and judges in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein will stop using Microsoft’s software for work. Instead, the state will adopt open-source alternatives to regain control over data storage and ensure digital sovereignty. During the first phase, Microsoft Word and Excel will be replaced by LibreOffice, while Open-Xchange will replace Outlook for managing emails and calendars.
- Denmark dumps Microsoft Office and Windows for LibreOffice and Linux. Denmark’s Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. It’s not because open-source is better, but because Denmark wants to claim its digital sovereignty and independence from the US.
- ESA seeks funding for European ‘security and resilience’ satellite program. The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced plans to request funding for a new European satellite system focused on “security and resilience”. A standout feature of this system will be its significantly better temporal resolution than satellites currently operated by individual European countries. In a similar effort, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, in collaboration with SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, has launched over 200 satellites in just two years. ESA has previously highlighted “rapid and resilient crisis response” as one of its top three priorities for accelerated development.
- Oracle and G42 promote AI sovereignty in UAE. The Abu Dhabi holding G42, specialised in the development of AI, has announced its intention to create Stargate UAE , a next-generation computing infrastructure that will be built in the 5-gigawatt UAE–US AI campus in Abu Dhabi. A 1-gigawatt cluster will be built by G42 and operated by Oracle and OpenAI. Other project partners include Cisco, NVIDIA, and SoftBank Group. The project aims at promoting AI sovereignty in the country, despite the involvement of many foreign players.
- AWS announces its next regional implementation of Landing Zone Accelerator. The next regional implementation of Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS will support customers with workloads in Germany. The C5-ready Landing Zone Accelerator will be available to AWS’s customers in Q3-2025, and at launch, the regional implementations will also be available in AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS EU sovereign cloud will be a fully logically and physically isolated infrastructure to serve European clients with digital sovereignty requirements. It will also allow a single vendor multi-cloud model as clients will be able to leverage the AWS commercial cloud and the EU sovereign cloud as two different deployments at the same time.
If you want to learn more about digital sovereignty developments reach out to Forrester to schedule an inquiry or guidance session and we can discuss more on your sovereign AI, cloud, network, and software initiatives.