Most EU businesses rely on US cloud, exposing data to foreign surveillance

More than 80% of EU businesses rely on US-based cloud and analytics services, exposing customer data to American surveillance laws and intensifying compliance risks under GDPR and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. Italian startup Regolo pitches a fully European, zero data retention platform as a way to keep Artificial Intelligence workloads compliant and sovereign.

European companies are heavily dependent on US-based cloud and analytics providers, creating a structural vulnerability for customer privacy and regulatory compliance. According to Regolo, over 80% of EU businesses rely on US-based cloud services, which means sensitive customer data can fall under foreign surveillance regimes such as the US CLOUD Act, allowing American authorities access without EU oversight. This dynamic is framed as a “data giveaway” that not only complicates compliance but also undermines customer trust and risks substantial penalties under the general data protection regulation in a market that is highly sensitive to privacy.

The reliance on US technology platforms is portrayed as a transfer of digital sovereignty from Europe to Silicon Valley. A typical scenario described is a German retailer using a popular US analytics tool to monitor shopper behavior, where every click, purchase, and personal detail silently travels across the Atlantic and may become accessible to third parties or government agencies. Recent reports are cited as showing that these dependencies have already contributed to data breaches affecting millions of individuals, leaving EU firms with reputational harm and legal challenges. Against this backdrop, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act has come into force with key provisions enforced as of 2026, classifying Artificial Intelligence systems by risk level and imposing strict rules on data governance, transparency, and bias mitigation for high risk uses.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act intersects directly with GDPR, and many European companies using US-based Artificial Intelligence tools may now fall out of compliance if foreign vendors do not meet European requirements. The text notes that companies could face fines up to 7% of global turnover or even bans on prohibited practices like untargeted biometric data scraping. Regolo, powered by Italian infrastructure provider Seeweb, positions itself as a corrective to these risks through a “Zero Data Retention” model that avoids unnecessary storage of customer data and supports data minimization for Artificial Intelligence training under the new rules. Running entirely on fully European 100% green infrastructure within EU borders, Regolo emphasizes encryption, anonymization, and GPU processing with zero storage to help organizations in sectors such as software-as-a-service, e-commerce, financial technology, pharmaceuticals, and public administration deploy Artificial Intelligence while maintaining regulatory compliance. The company promotes its service with an introductory offer to “experience the first 30 days free, then enjoy 70% off for the subsequent three months,” presenting itself as both a privacy safeguard and a cost-effective path to Artificial Intelligence-driven innovation without cross-border exposure.

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Impact Score

Context-rich data emerges as a priority for enterprise artificial intelligence projects

Enterprises deploying artificial intelligence agents are finding that success depends not just on data volume but on well-governed, context-rich data that aligns structured and unstructured sources. Financial services, manufacturing and betting firms describe how poor discoverability, inconsistent identifiers and weak metadata undermine both productivity and legal defensibility.

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