European governments are moving selected public software and data contracts away from American suppliers. France chose domestic provider Scaleway to host its Health Data Hub and is reducing reliance on Windows, while the European Commission awarded a €180 million sovereign-cloud tender to Scaleway, Clever Cloud, OVHcloud, and Germany's STACKIT. The shift responds partly to the 2018 CLOUD Act, which can compel United States companies to provide law-enforcement access to data stored abroad. Yet dependence survives inside some European offerings. One tender winner uses S3NS, a venture between France's Thales and Google Cloud, and French search engine Qwant previously relied on Microsoft's Bing.

Digital sovereignty takes material form in procurement files. A ministry can move records to servers on European soil and still inherit a foreign company's legal exposure, software layer, or search index. Open-source replacements such as Linux and LibreOffice reduce certain vendor ties, while in-house public tools create their own costs and criticism. The political task lies in tracing each service through its owners, subcontractors, licenses, data requests, and update channels. Public contracts can give smaller regional providers revenue and reach, though dividing work among several firms may limit the scale any one of them gains. Independence will be measured clause by clause, including which company receives an official's file and which jurisdiction can order that company to surrender it.