Garman said that customers wanted more controls around sovereignty before they moved data stored on-premise into the cloud. “And now we’re giving them a cloud that doesn’t force them to make those trade offs. And we think that that unlocks a huge amount of business,” he said.

The European Sovereign Cloud includes customer-controlled encryption, for instance, where customers can control the keys to their encryption and so that “that if anyone was even able to get access to [their data], they wouldn’t be able to read it,” Garman said.

“We think that those various levels of protection, both technology protections as well as policy protections, really layer that on and provide a really unique offering that’s just different than anything out there today,” he added.

Stéphane Israël will lead the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Stefan Hoechbauer, who is vice president of AWS global sales for Germany and Europe Central, has been appointed as a managing director. AWS also announced five new members of an advisory board for the sovereign cloud, three of which are Amazon employees.

AWS said the sovereign cloud has “no critical dependencies on non-EU infrastructure” and it can continue to operate in the event of a communications disruption with the rest of the world. Under “extreme circumstances, authorised AWS employees of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, who are EU residents, will have independent access to a replica of the source code needed to maintain the AWS European Sovereign Cloud services,” the company said.

For the past few years, European politicians and regulators have grown concerned about the dominance of U.S. tech firms over critical technology infrastructure.

Despite the EU pushing for regional companies to grow their businesses, AWS, Microsoft and Google account for 70% of the cloud computing market in the region, according to Synergy Research Group.

Even as AWS pushes its sovereign cloud, European regulators are currently investigating cloud computing services from Amazon and Microsoft under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to curb the power of Big Tech.

In 2024, Amazon said it would invest 7.8 billion euros ($9.1 billion) in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany through 2040. On Thursday, Amazon said it would expand the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal.

Elsewhere, AWS expects AI demand to continue accelerating. “We continue to be pleasantly surprised at how much demand is out there, really,” Garman said.

“I do think that throughout 2026 we’ll see more and more customers really starting to get positive ROI out of their AI investments,” he added, adding that via its AI coding agent Kiro customers were building “fantastic new experiences into everything from financial services to healthcare to retail, really kind of reimagining what’s out there. So it’s going from proof of concept to more implementation within the organization.” 

Garman is also excited about robots and “world models,” which refer to AI models that understand the physical, real world and are needed to make complex robots work, also referred to “physical AI.” He said that AWS was not currently building its own world model, however.

“Robotics is an enormous opportunity across many different industries, and so we’re quite excited about it. And when [will] we really kind of hit that capabilities curve? You know, it’s anybody’s guess, but that technology is progressing really rapidly,” he added.