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Airbus has decided to remove its most sensitive applications from the Amazon cloud. And the European aerospace manufacturer has signed a multi-year agreement with the French Scaleway, owned by Iliad, to host the critical systems of its industrial and defense operations, as confirmed by the company itself, a movement that drives the desire for technological sovereignty that more and more companies and institutions are beginning to apply. What has happened? Airbus will begin migrating 70 applications from AWS to Scaleway’s infrastructure, a first package within a much broader plan that could cover up to 900 applications in the next five or six years, according to they count from Reuters. Among the affected systems are aircraft design, engineering, industrial production and corporate management tools, as well as ERP, manufacturing execution, CRM and product lifecycle management programs, as expand from The Register. Strategy. Catherine Jestin, chief digital officer at Airbus, explained that the company sought to ensure that its data remained “under European control”, away from the reach of US laws such as the Cloud Actwhich allows the United States Government to request access to data stored in data centers of American companies, even if they are located outside its territory. The context does not help either, since trade and geopolitical tensions between Washington and Europe, fueled by Donald Trump’s foreign policy, have triggered the distrust of European companies towards the big US technology companies. In detail. According to the company, Airbus evaluated more than 150 technical and legal requirements before choosing Scaleway. One of the points that weighed the most, according to Jestin, was the protection against what the directive itself described as the “kill switch”, that is, the possibility that a foreign provider could cut off access to services by decision of its government of origin. It also influenced that Scaleway already hosts the artificial intelligence models of Mistralthe French startup with which Airbus signed an agreement in May to develop tailored AI tools for the aerospace and defense sector. “The fact that Mistral models are already deployed on Scaleway’s infrastructure will allow us to accelerate our AI approach,” admitted Jestin. Between the lines. It should be noted that the move does not mean a complete break with American suppliers. And Airbus has clarified that it will continue working with AWS for platforms such as Skywise, its aviation data analysis system, and with Microsoft and Google for its productivity tools, according to share from The Register. The company will also continue to rely on providers such as Salesforce, Coupa or Workday. “We do not intend to move away from all non-European solutions; we balance our decisions based on the criticality of the data,” explained Jestin in the middle. And now what. The Airbus case comes at a time when the European Commission has proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act, a regulation aimed at boosting cloud computing and storage capacity within the European Union. Giants such as AWS, Microsoft and Google have already launched their own versions of “sovereign cloud” to try to retain their European customers, although not always successfully. And just as share from The Register, a Microsoft executive even admitted under oath before a French court that he could not guarantee full data sovereignty. Cover image | Airbus and Markus Spiske In Xataka | Technology has become so expensive that Apple has revived a disturbing idea: renting iPhones, iPads and Macs