Since 2022-2023, all three hyperscalers have launched sovereign offerings targeting the European market:

AWS European Sovereign Cloud: physically in Europe, operated by European employees, with enhanced access controls. What the offering does not say: Amazon.com Inc. remains subject to the US CLOUD Act. A National Security Letter can compel Amazon to provide data without informing the client, regardless of server location.

Microsoft Cloud de Confiance with Bleu: a French subsidiary (Bleu, Capgemini + Orange) operates Microsoft infrastructure in France. Technology remains Microsoft's. Contract remains subject to Irish and US law for the underlying technology.

Google Sovereign Controls: client-managed encryption reducing Google's data access. Partial reduction of exposure — not complete sovereignty.

Physical sovereignty: where are the servers? Resolved. Servers are in Europe.

Legal sovereignty: which law applies? Not resolved. The parent company remains American, subject to the CLOUD Act and California law (Terms §14.12 documented in Terms Under the Microscope).

Sovereignty Washing sells the physical resolution as if it also resolved the legal dimension. The decision-maker who reads Sovereign Cloud believes both are resolved. Only one is.

RECs (Renewable Energy Certificates): a certificate attesting that an equivalent quantity of energy was injected into the grid by a renewable source. The server hosting your data continues consuming whatever energy is available locally — which may be predominantly fossil. RECs balance the accounting, not the grid.

PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements): long-term renewable energy purchase contracts, more substantive than RECs. But a PPA signed in Spain does not mean the Virginia datacentre runs on Spanish wind. Electrons do not travel that way.

The Northern Virginia electrical grid — where the largest AWS and Microsoft datacentres concentrate — is powered approximately 30-35% by fossil sources according to 2023 EIA (US Energy Information Administration) data.

Pooling genuinely reduces consumption versus individual under-utilised datacentres. But poorly designed serverless architectures — Lambda cold-starting, idle containers, monitoring querying APIs every 30 seconds — consume compute continuously. Nobody measures kWh per request. The green pooling is real at datacentre scale — cancelled by the application inefficiency cloud encourages through its billing model.

While European governments produce reports on digital sovereignty, public administrations sign cloud contracts with the same hyperscalers they claim to want to reduce.

In France: DINUM selected AWS, Azure and Google in its Cloud au Centre programme for public administrations. Public hospitals migrate to Microsoft Azure. Universities use Google Workspace for Education. Ministries deploy on AWS.

The European Union itself massively uses US hyperscaler services for its own institutions — while funding the GAIA-X programme intended to create a European alternative.

The Finance Washing paradox: public money funds hyperscalers through procurement. These same hyperscalers use part of this money for lobbying on European regulations (GDPR, Data Act, AI Act). European taxpayer money indirectly funds resistance to the regulations that would protect them.

Documented in The CPF Misused: cloud certification spending tripled between 2020 and 2023. Public professional training money massively funds AWS, GCP and Azure certifications. These certifications reinforce dependency by creating a labour market that values proprietary skills above neutral skills. The public training system funds the cognitive capture documented in The Newspeak That Costs Dear.

Sovereignty Washing: Data residency as false friend · Compliance shifting responsibility · Global infrastructure masking extraterritoriality. Documented in The Newspeak That Costs Dear.

Green Washing: RECs not equal physical green energy · kWh/request unmeasured · Sustainability team ticking the box. Documented in The Newspeak blind spots (Section 7 GreenOps).

Finance Washing: training funds proprietary certifications · public money cognitive capture. Documented in The CPF Misused.

The term Cloud-Washing unifies these three mechanisms under a common label and says they are not three independent problems — they are three layers of the same conviction system designed to validate migration through three different directorates with three different arguments. The engineer who would say no must now convince all three simultaneously.