Snowflake and STACKIT announce integration for data sovereignty in Europe

Snowflake and STACKIT are partnering to offer sovereign data and AI services to businesses across Europe, with a focus on regulated sectors in Germany. STACKIT is the cloud platform of the Schwarz Group, the parent company of Lidl and Kaufland, and operates data centres exclusively in Germany and Austria.

The collaboration fits into a broader movement in the European cloud market, where organisations in financial services, healthcare and the public sector are increasingly requiring that their data demonstrably stays within the EU and is not accessible to jurisdictions outside Europe. Both Snowflake and STACKIT have each been positioning themselves on this theme for some time, but a direct integration between the two platforms had not previously been announced.

Concrete technical details about the integration, such as which Snowflake services will become available via the STACKIT infrastructure and from what date, were not yet fully available at the time of publication. The information in this article is based on Snowflake's announcement and background data on both companies.

STACKIT as a European cloud provider with roots in retail

STACKIT was launched in 2018 as the internal cloud and colocation provider of the Schwarz Group and opened its doors to external customers in 2022. The platform currently operates three data centres: two in Germany, in Neckarsulm and Ellhofen, and one in Ostermiething, Austria. Additional availability zones near Heilbronn are under construction.

With approximately 500 employees, STACKIT says it focuses on small and medium-sized enterprises and the public sector. The company uses OpenStack as the foundation for its cloud infrastructure and has previously announced partnerships with Google and SAP. In April 2026, STACKIT was selected by the European Commission as one of four cloud providers in a tender worth 180 million euros.

The Schwarz Group, the parent company, is also involved in the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI) in Heilbronn and invested, through the Dieter Schwarz Stiftung, in the German AI company Aleph Alpha. This makes STACKIT part of a broader European AI infrastructure strategy within the Schwarz Group, even though STACKIT operates as an independent cloud platform.

Snowflake's approach to European sovereignty demands

Snowflake has been working for some time on expansion into what it describes as sovereign markets in Europe. The company announced it would place its first zonal archive outside the US within the EU, so that usage data from European customers is stored within the region. Snowflake is also developing stricter access controls through a regional support model.

Snowflake is also a launch partner for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which is expected to go live in Brandenburg, Germany, by the end of 2025. The partnership with STACKIT aligns with that direction: by integrating with a European provider that keeps its infrastructure entirely within the EU, Snowflake can serve customers with stricter data residency requirements than a standard public cloud environment offers.

Snowflake reports processing five billion queries per day and counted more than ten thousand customers in fiscal year 2024, including more than 700 companies from the Forbes Global 2000. That scale makes a sovereign variant for Europe relevant to a substantial segment of its customer base.

Regulated sectors as the primary target audience

The integration is explicitly aimed at sectors where compliance requirements carry significant weight, such as financial services, healthcare and government agencies. Germany has strict rules governing the processing of personal data and business-critical information, partly under the GDPR and sector-specific legislation such as the NIS2 Directive on network and information security.

For organisations in these sectors, not only the location of the data matters, but also who can gain technical access to it. A cloud platform that is entirely European-owned and manages its infrastructure exclusively in Europe offers a legally distinct position compared with a European region of an American hyperscaler, where the right of access by US authorities under the CLOUD Act remains a recurring point of debate.

STACKIT explicitly positions itself on this distinction. Whether the integration with Snowflake also provides technical isolation from Snowflake's US infrastructure and operations, and how that is legally guaranteed, cannot yet be assessed on the basis of the information available.

Implications for the European cloud market

The collaboration between Snowflake and STACKIT illustrates a pattern that recurs in the European cloud market: large international software companies seek ties with European infrastructure providers to serve customers who, for legal or political reasons, do not wish to rely on an entirely American cloud stack. Earlier examples include partnerships between American technology companies and providers such as OVHcloud, Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems.

For Dutch and European founders, investors and policymakers, it is relevant that the market for sovereign cloud infrastructure is in flux. The European Commission is actively stimulating this segment, including through tenders in which European origin and data residency are weighted factors. STACKIT's selection by the Commission in April 2026 for a contract worth 180 million euros shows that European cloud providers are being found competitive against the major American vendors in public procurement. The question remains which technical and legal standards will ultimately become the norm for what 'sovereign' truly means in practice.