KPN launches sovereign cloud with Stackit

• ‘Sovereign’ services are all the rage
• Dutch national operator has launched KPN Sovereign Cloud 
• Its key partner is Stackit, the cloud platform of German multinational Schwarz Group
• Stackit is becoming an increasingly important partner for digital service providers, including telcos

Europe’s list of sovereign digital service offerings just grew a little longer following the launch of KPN Sovereign Cloud by the Dutch national operator, which has teamed up with Stackit, the cloud platform of German multinational Schwarz Group, to offer the service to the telco’s enterprise and public sector customers. 

The announcement is noteworthy for a number of reasons and not just because the sovereignty topic is red hot right now, as the popularity of TelecomTV’s recent free-to-download report, Digital Sovereignty: What It Means for Telcos, and the post-event plaudits for the Digital Sovereignty Requirements session held at TelecomTV’s recent DSP Leaders World Forum have proven. 

First, it augments the sovereign service offerings of KPN, which, as the telco’s Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, Benji Koetzee, told TelecomTV in March during an interview conducted at MWC26, has “always been part of how we work. We're a national operator. We operate local infrastructure, local datacentres, local applications, store data locally. So we've always been a sovereign player and always been a sovereign supporter – we just never positioned it always that way.”

But as Koetzee also noted, the “definition of sovereign is also a little bit still fluid… we take an extremely conservative approach to sovereignty in terms of European soil, European locality, ideally everything in the Netherlands. However, there is a spectrum of sovereignty – on which architecture, which platform, which product, which portfolio for which customer.”

Which brings us to our second point – sovereign can be regional as well as national, as KPN’s “spectrum of sovereignty” clearly includes European Union markets, as KPN’s new service is initially enabled (and available now) by a cloud platform hosted in Germany and Austria ahead of the service being made available from KPN’s datacentre facilities in the Netherlands from mid-2027. 

That intra-EU cloud platform is run by Stackit, part of Schwarz Digits (the digital division of the Schwarz Group) digital division that is quickly becoming a lynchpin for all kinds of telecom sector operations, particularly those with a sovereign bent. KPN, meanwhile, provides the connectivity and IT services that complement the capabilities of the Stackit cloud. 

“With Stackit, KPN adds a European sovereign public cloud to its portfolio, under European ownership, governance and law,” noted KPN. “The collaboration with Schwarz Digits aligns with KPN’s broader strategic cloud offering, which includes public, hybrid and private cloud solutions. Different data, applications and risk levels require different approaches,” noted KPN.  

This approach – a regional sovereign cloud with the jurisdiction of EU member country borders – ties in with the telco’s support of the Open Cloud Alliance, an initiative that KPN co-founded in April with six other Dutch IT companies – Centric, Info Support, Intermax, Nebul, Previder, and Uniserver. That collaboration “aims to make digital sovereignty more practical through clear agreements on data location, transparency on access and control, and the development of Dutch and European alternatives.” 

Then there is the timing element – this isn’t a market that anyone wants to miss. And clearly, time is of the essence – the demand for such services is growing and KPN would not have wanted to wait until next year to launch such an offering and the operator’s strategy update, unveiled last November, included a more concerted effort to generate “long-term growth in the business market”, which it expects to continue outperforming the market, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 3% between 2025 and 2027. 

“European organisations increasingly seek greater control over their data and digital infrastructure, particularly in sectors [government, financial services, energy, healthcare] where privacy, security and resilience are critical,” noted KPN in its launch announcement, adding that it is making “substantial investments in this collaboration to make this sovereign European cloud accessible in the Netherlands”, though it didn’t state the exact level of planned investment.

Research firm Gartner, meanwhile, expects the sovereign cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in Europe to grow in value by 83% this year to be worth $12.59bn and nearly double in size to be worth $23.12bn in 2027, as it noted in this press release.  

KPN’s CEO Joost Farwerck stated: “In the Netherlands and Europe, there is a clear need for sovereign cloud solutions. Dutch companies and public organisations are increasingly looking for greater control over their data and a secure European cloud at scale. KPN is an important Dutch cloud supplier, which is part of our ‘Connect, Activate & Grow’ strategy, especially in the business market. Developing European sovereign cloud solutions requires action and the ability to bring together expertise and resources. That’s why I'm happy to announce our partnership today. Together we are taking an important step forward by combining the demands of our customers, our KPN expertise and the knowledge and scale of Stackit.”

Which brings us to Stackit’s growing influence on the telecom and cloud services sector. 

Bernd Wagner, chief sales officer at Schwarz Digits, noted: “With the strategic partnership between KPN and Schwarz Digits, we are turning the vision of digital sovereignty in Europe into a technological reality. Through our joint go-to-market strategy, we bundle the first-class connectivity and market position of KPN with the sovereign cloud stack of Stackit to a European powerhouse. A crucial milestone is the deep integration of our services directly into KPN's Dutch datacentres. Customers can purchase the entire solution directly from KPN as their trusted partner. German companies benefit massively from the new option of seamlessly using the cloud region of the Netherlands in their existing Stackit setup. By establishing Stackit as a European hyperscaler, we offer an independent alternative and form the backbone for a sovereign IT infrastructure that sets a new standard.”

KPN isn’t the only telco leaning on the Stackit cloud to offer cross-border sovereign cloud services. 

BT International, the branch of the UK national telco that is currently seeking a new investor/partner/owner now that BT Group is firmly focused on UK operations, recently teamed up with Stackit to offer multinational companies with operations inside and outside the European Union zone access to a private European sovereign cloud service in a way that complies with the region’s strict data and security regulations. 

Stackit is also one of the cloud providers selected in April by the European Commission to provide sovereign cloud services up to the value of €180m to European Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies over the next six years. 

And earlier this year, Schwarz Group announced that as part of plans to expand the MVNO operations of its international supermarket operation Lidl via a partnership with eSIM platform operator 1Global, “innovative telco solutions” would be developed on Stackit.  

And the Schwarz Group is reaching even further afield: It announced in April that as part of a broader partnership and investment deal with Cohere, which will see the Canadian AI giant merge with German AI company Aleph Alpha (in which Schwarz Group is an investor), Schwarz Group is set to collaborate with Cohere/Aleph Alpha to develop a sovereign AI service offering based on Stackit. 

While nearly every day brings news of a new sovereign digital services offering, the debate still rages as to what exactly defines a sovereign service (and there was certainly no consensus among the nine telcos that responded to questions for our Digital Sovereignty: What It Means for Telcos report.

The topic is examined in detail in the hot-off-the-presses Unthinkable Lab Report: The Telecoms Sovereignty Gap – How to Bridge it, which examines the “widening  ‘sovereignty gap’ – the growing disconnect between the desire for sovereign infrastructure and the practical ability to achieve it.”

Keep up to date with all the latest hot digital sovereignty trends in the dedicated sovereignty section of the TelecomTV website. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV