Airbus is moving around 900 applications away from Amazon Web Services to French cloud provider Scaleway, with an initial 70 apps prioritised, as part of a push to bring critical systems and data under European control. The move is presented as evidence that "digital sovereignty" is a genuine commercial concern for European businesses rather than mere political posturing, driven by concerns that American platforms cannot adequately shield sensitive data from US government access.

The critical systems earmarked for repatriation include ERP, CRM and manufacturing platforms, but the plan notably omits supply chain management, a major gap given Airbus's roughly 18,000 global suppliers, most of whom rely on Microsoft systems. This makes a full exit from Microsoft or Google's productivity tools impractical for now, since no European alternative currently exists at the scale required. The article also notes Airbus's AI strategy deliberately avoids agents, code generation and automation in critical systems, favouring on-premises deployment for functions such as knowledge extraction, chatbots and flight automation instead.