Worldwide spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure will rise to over $80 billion in 2026. Governments and regulated sectors remain the largest customers.
Global spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure will reach $80.4 billion in 2026. This represents a growth of 35.6 percent compared to 2025, according to Gartner. The increase is linked to geopolitical tensions and a growing focus on digital sovereignty.
According to Gartner, organizations outside the United States and China are investing more in local cloud infrastructure. They want to keep data, workloads, and economic value within their own national borders. Governments remain the most important customers. Highly regulated sectors and critical infrastructure providers, such as energy, utilities, and telecom, are also following suit.
Europe accelerates
China will remain by far the largest market for sovereign cloud IaaS in 2026, with spending of $47.4 billion. China quickly built its own cloud infrastructure and never developed the dependence on American cloud providers that is the norm in Europe.
North America follows at a distance with $16.4 billion. Europe is growing faster than both regions and will reach a total of $12.6 billion in 2026. Gartner expects Europe to overtake North America in 2027, with a market of $23.1 billion versus $21.1 billion in the US.
| Region | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 |
| China (Region) | 37,539 | 47,379 | 58,544 |
| North America | 12,667 | 16,394 | 21,127 |
| Europe | 6,868 | 12,587 | 23,118 |
| Developed Asia/Pacific | 851 | 1,593 | 3,155 |
| Japan (Region) | 519 | 932 | 1,816 |
| Emerging Asia/Pacific | 430 | 755 | 1,326 |
| Latin America | 278 | 506 | 946 |
| M-East & N-Africa | 132 | 250 | 515 |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 16 | 31 | 61 |
| Total | 59,300 | 80,427 | 110,609 |
According to Gartner, most of the spending does not come from migrations of existing cloud environments. These are not (yet) being actively questioned. The lure of sovereign infrastructure is strongest for workloads that have not yet been parked with a hyperscaler. Approximately 80 percent of spending goes to new digital applications or older workloads that have not yet moved to the cloud.
Local shift
Gartner sees a trend of what it calls geopatriation. Due to national regulations and political choices, an estimated twenty percent of current workloads will still shift from international hyperscalers to local cloud providers. Governments are increasingly asking for regional platforms that better align with national security and compliance requirements.
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This shift puts pressure on large international cloud players. According to Gartner, it is not enough to treat digital sovereignty purely as a compliance issue. Cloud providers must take into account specific requirements regarding data storage, governance, and control per country in order to remain relevant in local markets.
‘Sovereign’ hyperscalers
The American players are strongly committed to what they themselves call ‘sovereign cloud’. These are variations of their offering in which they offer their cloud functionality in a local guise, usually with extra local control. In practice, the hyperscalers remain subject to American legislation, which means that such an offer cannot really be called sovereign.
AWS is making a strong case with the launch of its new sovereign cloud that this is the case, but after urging, has not yet answered our question whether the local offering effectively offers protection against American interference via the Cloud Act, or any hypothetical technology embargoes in the future.