SAP CEO Klein Saves Europe from 'Sovereign' Disaster

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how Christian Klein’s
stance could shift the entire European tech economy away from
imitation toward AI-driven transformation


Highlights


00:20 — A few months ago a lot of countries
within Europe were saying, “What we need to do is build
hyperscalers to match the ones based in the U.S.” Now, SAP CEO
Christian Klein stood up and said, “That’s nuts. Let’s not do
that. There’s a very different way to go on this.” And over the
past few weeks, we've seen some significant investments coming
from SAP.


01:12 — The investments are great, and all those
ideals about wanting to have data privacy, data security, all
valid in the AI Revolution. What really stood out here, more than
these investments, was: think about what might have happened had
the European Union spent trillions of dollars to keep up with the
hyperscalers.


02:10 — SAP has a whole new plan for the
sovereign cloud. Its Executive Board Member Thomas Saueressig has
been involved in this. He said, “We want to have a sovereign
cloud that gives the greatest safeguards and compliance to
customers, and also gives them a great deal of choice. We want to
keep this open for lots of partners to work with us.” But that’s
the direction it's taking.


 


03:13 — So, we've got SAP pledging to invest,
over the next few years, $22 billion in its sovereign cloud. Just
the other day, I noted something about how Oracle, Microsoft, and
OpenAI—now it’s about a trillion dollars that they’re pumping
into these AI data centers. That’s really not the place for the
European economy to go. And I give Christian Klein credit:.


04:14 —SAP partner AWS has now pledged about
$8.5 billion for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. I also thought
it was interesting that SAP Chief Technology Officer Philipp
Herzig came said, “We’ve got cloud sovereignty, we’ve got data
sovereignty—now we need to be sure that SAP is a leader in AI
sovereignty.”


05:00 — So, fascinating time here on the
technology front. I think SAP is going to continue to do very
well with its sovereign cloud efforts. But I think even more than
that, its CEO, Christian Klein, really stood out. He did a great
service by getting them off of this idea of imitating what’s
already been done.


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