Chatham House Finds 16 of 28 European States at High Risk to US Cloud Kill Switch, Including Germany, Poland, UK
Chatham House's public-procurement analysis, corroborated across Euronews and Manila Times, operationalizes what European defense ministries have avoided stating publicly: core military-cloud workloads sit on infrastructure US executive action could silence, and the CLOUD Act nullifies the sovereign-regional options US hyperscalers market as a workaround. The Dutch KPN-Thales defense cloud and the Suse-Cubbit-Elemento-StorPool disaster-recovery stack are the first live native alternatives, but both remain dependent on US-origin hardware and years from defense-grade availability, making contractual safeguards and data-portability clauses the likely near-term European hedge. The kill-switch framing may overstate the operative risk; most hyperscaler contracts already include sovereign-exit and key-custody clauses, and the real exposure is CLOUD Act data-request leverage rather than a literal shutdown. For US IC, allied services now hold an explicit counter-lever: if Washington can activate the kill-switch, partner agencies will harden faster and share less, in ways UKUSA liaison has not previously had to accommodate.