5 EU Cloud Providers That Can Replace AWS in 2026

If you're building in Europe and storing user data on AWS, you're sending that data to US-controlled infrastructure — and exposing yourself to CLOUD Act requests that bypass GDPR protections.

Here are five EU-headquartered cloud providers worth switching to.

1. Hetzner (Germany) Hetzner offers bare-metal servers and cloud instances from data centers in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, and Ashburn. Pricing is among the lowest in the industry — a 2 vCPU / 4GB RAM instance runs €3.29/month vs ~$18 on AWS.

**Best for:** Cost-conscious teams, VPS, dedicated servers.

2. Scaleway (France) Subsidiary of Iliad Group, Scaleway runs on 100% renewable energy and offers compute, object storage, managed Kubernetes, and serverless functions from Paris and Amsterdam.

**Best for:** Developer-first teams, green cloud mandate.

3. OVHcloud (France) Europe's largest cloud provider by infrastructure scale. OVHcloud has 43 data centers globally but is French-owned and operated. It offers bare metal, private cloud, and public cloud services.

**Best for:** Enterprise-scale workloads, private cloud.

4. Exoscale (Switzerland) Swiss-made cloud infrastructure operated exclusively in European data centers (Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria). Strict Swiss privacy laws apply on top of GDPR.

**Best for:** Highest privacy requirements, Swiss data residency.

5. IONOS (Germany) Germany's answer to GoDaddy, but significantly more privacy-friendly. IONOS offers shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers from German data centers with ISO 27001 certification.

**Best for:** SMEs, WordPress hosting, simple deployments.

Bottom line For most European startups and SMEs, **Hetzner** offers the best combination of price, performance, and EU compliance. For teams with green mandates, **Scaleway** is the default.