De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank, is dumping AWS for a cloud platform built by the company that owns Lidl. Yes, the supermarket. Sales Director Bernd Wagner announced the deal at Hannover Messe this week. DNB will migrate to Stackit, the cloud platform from Schwarz Digits, the IT arm of Schwarz Group, which runs Lidl and Kaufland across Europe.
The motivation isn't mysterious. DNB Director Steven Maijoor said last October he wanted to "set a good example" by switching to a European cloud. The concern is the US Cloud Act, which lets American authorities demand data from US cloud providers. When a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague got cut off from his Microsoft email by executive order, it concentrated minds. DNB and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets had already warned that Dutch finance had grown too dependent on foreign infrastructure.
The catch is quality. Maijoor admitted that European clouds can't yet match US providers on reliability and performance. AWS, Azure, and Google have two decades of development behind them. Stackit started as Lidl's internal system for managing supermarket supply chains. Schwarz acquired OpenStack provider Cloud&Heat in 2020 and has since landed SAP and Bayern Munich as clients. They're pouring 11 billion euros into a data center in Lübbenau. It's serious money, but serious money doesn't instantly close a twenty-year engineering gap. Still, the sovereignty argument is winning. With no viable substitute at that scale, hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft will outbid smaller buyers for remaining supply.
The migration will be bumpy, and everyone knows it. Schleswig-Holstein's government is already struggling with its own move away from Microsoft. But for institutions handling sensitive financial data under European jurisdiction, the calculus has shifted. Better a slightly less capable cloud you actually control than a polished one you don't.