A Swedish startup called Evroc has declared ambitious plans to build a pan-European cloud platform to take on American heroes Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure.
Founded in 2022 to "power a digital Europe," the biz has backing from EQT Ventures and Norrsken VC, and wants to raise €3 billion ($3.2 billion) to build and operate two hyperscale datacenters over the next two years. It aims to expand these to eight bitbarns by 2028 along with three software development hubs, and hire over 3,000 people.
Evroc said that it wants to build Europe's first "secure, sovereign, and sustainable hyperscale cloud," and put an end to "foreign dominance of the European cloud market." This could prove to be a tall order, as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud collectively account for
66 percent of global spending on cloud infrastructure services between them.
As the company points out, cloud services now play a key role in IT infrastructure, with the European cloud market growing five-fold between 2017 and 2022. However, the share of this market by European cloud players fell from 27 percent to 13 percent during the same period, according to Evroc. "The lack of home-grown hyperscale cloud providers poses a serious challenge for Europe," founder and CEO Mattias Åström said in a statement.
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