Netherlands urges EU banks to pool purchasing power against US Big Tech

Europe's banks and financial firms should pool their purchasing power so they don't lose out in negotiations with large US tech companies. That's the recommendation in a package of Dutch proposals aimed at reducing Europe's dependence on foreign providers of critical services, including AI and cloud computing.

What the Dutch proposals say

The authors start from the premise that even large European banks lack sufficient negotiating weight on their own when dealing with the US tech giants that supply cloud infrastructure and AI services. By pooling the purchasing power of financial institutions, Europe should be able to secure better contract terms and reduce its dependence on a handful of dominant foreign providers. The logic mirrors that of large corporate purchasing consortia in other industries: the bigger the combined order, the stronger the customer's hand against an infrastructure supplier.

• The initiative comes from the Netherlands
• The recommendations target Europe's banks and financial firms
• The goal is to reduce the EU's dependence on foreign providers of critical services
• The focus is primarily on AI and cloud computing services

Why dependence on US clouds is back on the agenda

Europe's digital sovereignty has been debated at the EU level for several years. The vast majority of the cloud and AI infrastructure that European banks and corporations run on is built on services from three US hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The financial sector is especially sensitive to this dependence because regulators demand resilient critical infrastructure and protection of customer data. In particular, European regulation requires banks to assess concentration risk from relying on a limited pool of IT providers. The EU has floated similar initiatives to build its own cloud infrastructure before, but none has yet managed to seriously compete with US providers on the scale and functionality of AI services.

Why banks, rather than EU regulators as a whole

The banking sector is a convenient place to apply this kind of initiative. Financial institutions are both major buyers of cloud and AI services and the most tightly regulated industry when it comes to infrastructure resilience. By pooling procurement, banks could secure not only better prices but also contractual terms on data localization, service availability and workload portability between providers — in other words, reduce the risk of being held hostage by a single cloud vendor. For now, the proposal remains a set of recommendations rather than binding requirements. But its very existence shows that moving away from dependence on a few US tech giants has shifted from abstract declarations to the practical business of contract negotiations.

What this means

The proposal shows that the talk of European technological sovereignty rests on a very concrete financial logic: as long as the EU lacks competitive AI and cloud platforms of its own, its only lever over the terms of working with US tech giants is a joint negotiating position among large customers such as banks.