The best European alternatives to Google Cloud

Scaleway is arguably the most comprehensive European alternative to the US giants (AWS, Google Cloud), offering a true "full-stack" cloud experience. Headquartered in Paris, Scaleway provides a complete ecosystem that ranges from classic infrastructure to cutting-edge AI capabilities, all hosted within the EU (Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw) to guarantee data sovereignty. Unique among cloud providers, Scaleway excels in Bare Metal offerings (Dedibox and Elastic Metal), allowing users to rent dedicated physical hardware with cloud-like flexibility. For modern cloud-native applications, they offer a mature set of products including Instances (Virtual Machines), Kubernetes Kapsule (Managed K8s), Object Storage (S3-compatible), and Serverless Functions. Scaleway has recently positioned itself as a leader in European AI infrastructure. They provide high-performance GPU instances (including NVIDIA H100s) and a dedicated AI supercomputer capability (Nabu), making it a go-to choice for European companies training Large Language Models (LLMs) who wish to keep their data under EU jurisdiction. Their ecosystem also includes Managed Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis) and a suite of developer tools designed for ease of use. Environmental responsibility is a core pillar of Scaleway's identity. They are transparent about their water and energy usage, utilizing adiabatic cooling systems in their data centers to achieve some of the lowest PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) scores in the industry. For developers and enterprises seeking a sovereign, sustainable, and technologically advanced cloud platform that rivals the feature sets of American providers, Scaleway is the premier European choice.

Hetzner Cloud is widely recognized as one of the strongest European contenders in the cloud infrastructure market, particularly famous for its incredible price-to-performance ratio. Based in Germany, Hetzner owns and operates its own data centers in Nuremberg and Falkenstein (Germany), as well as Helsinki (Finland), ensuring strict adherence to GDPR and European data sovereignty standards. The platform's core offering revolves around its Cloud Servers, which can be deployed in seconds. Users can choose between standard Intel/AMD instances or dedicated vCPU instances for production workloads. Recently, they have also introduced Arm64-based cloud servers (Ampere Altra), providing even greater efficiency. Beyond basic compute, the ecosystem includes Managed Kubernetes, allowing developers to deploy containerized applications without the headache of managing the control plane. Simplicity is a key design philosophy. The Hetzner Cloud Console is intuitive and user-friendly, stripping away the overwhelming complexity often found in hyperscalers like AWS. For developers, a robust API and CLI tool make automation and infrastructure-as-code (via Terraform) seamless. Essential features like Load Balancers, Floating IPs, Firewalls, and Volumes (NVMe SSD block storage) are easy to configure and integrate. While it may lack the thousands of niche managed services found on the largest US platforms, Hetzner covers the fundamental needs of 90% of web applications and SaaS businesses at a fraction of the cost. The absence of data egress fees for most standard traffic is a significant cost advantage. For businesses looking for a reliable, privacy-focused, and cost-effective cloud provider within the EU, Hetzner is a top-tier choice.