Netherlands Calls on EU Banks to Pool Purchasing Power Against Big Tech from US

Banks and financial companies in Europe should combine their purchasing power to avoid losing in negotiations with large American technology companies — such a recommendation is contained in a package of Dutch proposals aimed at reducing Europe's dependence on foreign suppliers of critical services, including AI and cloud computing.

What is the essence of the Dutch proposals

The authors of the initiative proceed from the assumption that even large European banks individually possess insufficient negotiating leverage in dialogue with American tech giants — suppliers of cloud infrastructure and AI services. Consolidating the purchasing power of financial institutions should give Europe more favorable contract terms and reduce dependence on a few dominant foreign providers. The logic is similar to that applied by large corporate procurement consortiums in other industries: the larger the cumulative order, the stronger the negotiating position of the buyer relative to the infrastructure supplier.

• The initiative comes from the Netherlands
• Recipients of recommendations — banks and financial companies in Europe
• Goal — reducing EU dependence on foreign suppliers of critical services
• Focus — primarily AI services and cloud computing

Why the theme of dependence on

American clouds is back on the agenda

The question of Europe's digital sovereignty has been discussed at the EU level for several years: the vast majority of cloud and AI infrastructure on which European banks and corporations operate is built on services from three American hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The financial sector is particularly sensitive to this dependence due to regulatory requirements for the resilience of critical infrastructure and protection of customer data — in particular, European regulation requires banks to assess concentration risks from a limited number of IT suppliers. Previously, similar initiatives have been heard in the EU on the development of its own cloud infrastructure, but none have so far been able to pose serious competition to American providers in terms of scale and functionality of AI services.

Why exactly banks, and not EU regulators overall

The banking sector is a convenient point of application for such an initiative: financial institutions are simultaneously major customers of cloud and AI services and the most strictly regulated industry in terms of infrastructure resilience. By consolidating purchases, banks could achieve not only more favorable prices but also contractual conditions for data localization, service availability, and portability of workloads between providers — that is, reduce the risk of becoming hostage to a single cloud vendor. For now, the proposal remains at the level of recommendations rather than binding requirements, but the fact of its appearance shows that the theme of moving away from dependence on a few American tech giants has shifted from abstract declarations into practical negotiations over contracts.

What this means

The proposal shows that behind talk of European technological sovereignty lies quite concrete financial logic: as long as the EU lacks its own competitive AI and cloud platforms, the only lever of influence over the terms of working with American tech giants is the joint negotiating position of large customers like banks.