How To Create Your Own Euro Tech Stack

The ubiquity of US tech, from the backend infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services to the Microsoft and OpenAI products we use daily, is something most consumers take for granted. Certainly, non-US markets are vital to the American giants. For example, Microsoft had non-US revenues of USD 137bn in 2025, compared to domestic revenues of USD 145bn, while Meta generated USD 122bn from non-US markets compared to “only” USD 74.8bn domestically.

It stands to reason that the American tech giants, and the US government, are happy with the status quo and less than thrilled about EU regulations in the tech space. But European business insiders and policymakers have long been voicing objections to Europe’s dependence on tech stacks from other parts of the world.

The transatlantic friction during the second Trump administration has exacerbated these concerns. The pan-European think tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations, encapsulates a general sense of foreboding in a policy brief setting out a hypothetical future in which the ever-mercurial President Trump, citing “European digital policies and taxes as threats to American technology security”, orders a shutdown of cloud services, AI platforms and military software to foreign users. A very similar turn of events is also imagined in a recent piece in online tech journal The Register, titled “Euro Firms Must Ditch Uncle Sam’s Clouds and Go EU-Native”.

While scenarios centred around the current administration belligerently blocking tech services represent the more extreme end of concern, there are other, less dramatic reasons why, in the words of German MEP Alexandra Geese, “it’s not a good idea to be a digital colony of the US”. 

The economic impact of falling behind in the tech race has been frequently highlighted, as has the thorny issue of the US CLOUD Act. This is a federal law which allows US law enforcement to access data held by American companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, even if such data belongs to foreign citizens and is based in foreign data centres. This is a unilateral policy which doesn’t require cooperation between governments and directly conflicts with GDPR, whose Article 48 requires any disclosure of personal data to be based on an international agreement. 

European bodies are taking the situation seriously – see for example the European Commission’s Cloud and AI Development Act, a piece of flagship legislation which aims to reduce dependence by tripling data centre capacity over the next five to seven years. 

There’s also the “EuroStack” movement spearheaded by a group of academics, tech CEOs and parliamentarians, which advocates for European digital independence in everything from chip-making to cloud infrastructure to AI and data governance. One of the key phrases of the initiative is “Buy European”, in conscious emulation of what the EuroStack describes as “the ‘Buy American’ default that actively builds industrial capacity in the United States.” 

Organisations and European companies and non-profits have also come together to promote Digital Independence Day, which encourages people to reduce their reliance on the biggest tech giants by using alternative platforms on at least the first Sunday of every month. There are perhaps more of these than many users realise, and many can be found on the helpful directory European Alternatives. 

Here are some standout examples which, as well as being European companies, are also hosted on European servers (with one notable exception). 

One of the leading European email providers is Geneva-based Proton Mail, a service synonymous with its end-to-end encryption and adherence to Switzerland’s stringent privacy laws. Another option is mailbox, a Berlin-based provider which is carbon neutral and actively contributes to the open-source community, backing Chemnitz Linux Days and the Free Software Foundation Europe.

While Google remains the hegemonic search engine, there are European alternatives going strong. One is Paris-based Qwant, which does not retain search data or sell on personal information. There’s also Croydon-based Mojeek, which operates a strict no tracking policy and uses its own proprietary index to present results you might not find elsewhere.

A prominent European alternative to Microsoft’s suite of office productivity tools is LibreOffice, a creation of the Berlin-based non-profit organisation The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is free and includes alternatives to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. (It’s worth noting LibreOffice evolved directly from a still-available office alternative, called OpenOffice.)

Another free option worth knowing about are Apache OpenOffice,  is Calligra Suite, developed by KDE, an international open-source community founded in Germany.

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT maintains the biggest chatbot market share in Europe by far, one significant homegrown player is Le Chat, by Paris-based AI company Mistral. As well as providing an alternative for anyone concerned about GDPR compliance and European data sovereignty, Le Chat has been widely reported to be around 10 to 13 times faster than ChatGPT. 

The caveat here is that is hosted by Cloudflare, a US company, but Mistral’s significance as the preeminent European rival to OpenAI warranted its inclusion on this list. If you’re after a purely European alternative, the people behind Proton Mail have developed a chatbot, Lumo, which – like their email service – forefronts privacy and vows never to store logs or harvest data.

Workspace digitalisation and the mainstream adoption of hybrid working has made project management software a mission-critical component for companies large and small. Created by a Madrid-based company, Taiga is an open-source management interface which enables work delegation, progress tracking, collaboration and team auditing. Another popular platform is freispace, which is based in Germany and provides task management, resource management and associated tools.

US hyperscalers dominate the cloud hosting space, but there are many significant European players which offer dedicated servers, compute instances and managed web hosting services. Paris-based Scaleway, Helsinki-based UpCloud, Alkmaar-based Cyso Cloud and Montabaur-based IONOS are among the most prominent providers for anyone concerned about European data sovereignty and GDPR compliance.

One insider with deep knowledge of data sovereignty, security and other key issues at play in the tech space right now is Hampleton Partners sector principal Heiko Garrelfs. If you’re a founder, shareholder or investor looking for guidance as you prepare to enter the fast-evolving tech M&A space, don’t hesitate to reach out to Heiko to get the conversation started.

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