The study was carried out by Technopolis, Wavestone, STL Partners, Kappa Research, Timelex, and Open Forum Europe. Its findings have informed the Staff Working Document (SWD) accompanying the Impact Assessment of the proposal for the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), adopted on 3 June 2026.
Overall, the study addresses knowledge gaps by collecting evidence of current developments, trends, barriers, challenges and opportunities for cloud development across EU Member States. It supports the Commission in identifying and quantifying existing capacity and future demand for both general-purpose cloud services and AI-optimised cloud computing, including energy consumption.
The study provides a comprehensive overview of:
- Cross-border barriers to the provision of cloud services
- lock-in practices within the AI computing stack
- risks arising from third-country laws with extraterritorial effects
- permitting procedures for data centres
- financial and fiscal incentives
- constraints related to energy grids and other critical resources such as water
- initiatives to improve access to capital for data centre expansion
- public-sector efforts to promote the adoption of open source solutions
In addition, the study identifies the main challenges in the EU cloud and AI ecosystem:
- the limited and geographically concentrated availability of computing capacity within the EU
- the EU's dependence on cloud and AI computing services provided by non-European suppliers.
The report further analyses the underlying drivers of these problems and presents a range of policy options reflecting different levels of EU intervention. For each identified problem, the study assesses a baseline scenario alongside three sets of policy options, each comprising a number of policy measures. These options are evaluated through a monetised cost-benefit analysis and complemented by a multi-criteria decision analysis based on three methodological approaches. This analysis demonstrates the robustness of the preferred policy option.
Read the study and the executive summary.