Europe’s cloud problem is not a ban — it is a repricing, and most migration budgets are built on the wrong number. The CLOUD Act, GDPR, NIS2, DORA and the AI Act do not outlaw the three US hyperscalers that run roughly 70% of European cloud infrastructure. They change what that infrastructure costs to run compliantly. The €264B that leaves the EU each year is only the visible part of the bill; this dossier prices the invisible part — jurisdiction, exit rights, and the stack-level dependencies that a standard TCO model never captures.

The sovereignty conversation is misframed, and the misframing is what makes it expensive. Most “sovereign cloud” strategies fail because they treat sovereignty as a flag — European or not — when the operative question is layered: where the data physically sits, who can legally compel access to it, and which parts of the stack are genuinely portable versus quietly locked in. Priced as a binary, sovereignty is a slogan. Priced by layer, it becomes a decision you can actually defend to a board or a regulator.

Portability is the myth that hides the real cost. “We can just move providers” survives exactly until someone maps the stack layer by layer. This dossier runs that comparison — hyperscaler against European provider, capability by capability — and the equivalence analysis is where the comfortable assumptions break: the higher up the stack you go, the thinner the genuine European substitutes become.

The migration cost that sinks the business case is the one nobody lines up in advance. The headline egress and re-platforming numbers are the easy part. The categories that actually dominate the bill — and the sovereignty premium you pay for each hyperscaler “sovereign” partition — are the ones that surface in month nine of a migration, not in the board deck that approved it. We put them on the table before you sign.

This dossier is built to be used before the contract, not after the audit. It is not a vendor shortlist and not a compliance checklist masquerading as strategy. It is a decision-support framework: migration archetypes with a selection guide, a layer-by-layer maturity read on European providers, and a costing model that lets you price jurisdiction as a line item. The question it answers is the one every European infrastructure decision now turns on — what does sovereignty actually cost, per layer, for your stack — and it answers it before the next renewal locks you in for three more years.