Amazon Web Services is the incumbent, but Hetzner offers a European alternative rooted in EU data laws and stronger digital sovereignty.
Incumbent Solution
Amazon Web Services is the world's largest cloud infrastructure platform, operated by Amazon.com Inc. Offering 200+ services from global data centers, it is subject to the US CLOUD Act, which grants US authorities access to data regardless of where it is stored.
Amazon Web Services ownership profileEU Challenger
Hetzner is a German cloud and dedicated server provider, family-owned and headquartered in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria. It is widely known for its superior price-to-performance ratio and strict GDPR compliance, operating data centers exclusively in Germany and Finland.
Visit HetznerHetzner ownership profile| Metric | Amazon Web Services | Hetzner |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Seattle, US | Gunzenhausen, DE |
| Ownership | subsidiary · NASDAQ | private |
| Tax Domicile | US | DE |
| Ultimate Parent | Amazon.com Inc. | Hetzner Online GmbH |
| Data Hosting | mixed | EU |
| CLOUD Act Exposure | Yes ⚠️ | No ✓ |
| AI Trains on User Data | partial | no |
| GDPR | Fined €746M Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) fined Amazon Europe Core S.a.r.l. 746 million EUR in 2021 regarding ad-targeting data processing practices. | compliant |
| DSA Designation | standard | na |
| Carbon Neutral | claimed | claimed |
| B Corp | No | No |
| Supply Chain | partial | opaque |
| Repair / Recycling | No | No |
Last verified . Sources: Amazon Web Services on Wikidata, Amazon Web Services website, Hetzner website, How we audit.
Rigorous data for ethical digital consumption.
OVHcloud is Europe's largest cloud provider, headquartered in Roubaix, France. Founded and majority-owned by the Klaba family, it operates its own data centers across Europe with no CLOUD Act exposure. It is the leading European alternative to AWS for sovereign cloud infrastructure.
EU AllScaleway is a French cloud platform owned by Iliad Group (founded by Xavier Niel), offering compute, storage, and AI infrastructure. Operating entirely from European data centers, it is GDPR-compliant by design and a strong alternative to AWS and DigitalOcean.
EU All