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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