This is my second blog post about European public cloud services. I started this series with a deep dive into Cleura, a Swedish OpenStack-based provider. This time, in “Leaseweb Cloud: A European Cloud Alternative,” I am looking at a company much closer to home: Leaseweb, a Dutch cloud and infrastructure provider that has been operating since 1997 and is one of the most established European alternatives to the hyperscalers.
Before I start, I want to be open about one thing. I currently work at Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH. I am writing this the same way I wrote the Cleura post, as an overview for people weighing European cloud options, and I have kept it to information that is public and verifiable. The views here are my own and do not represent Leaseweb or bind the company in any way. Take the disclosure into account as you read, and make your own judgment.
The Need for Change
In recent years, the global business landscape has shifted dramatically, exposing the risks of depending on a single cloud provider, especially those headquartered outside the EU. With rising geopolitical tensions, particularly between the US and Europe, and growing scrutiny around data sovereignty, more organizations are rethinking their cloud strategy and looking for trusted European alternatives.
Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the NIS2 Directive, and key legal decisions such as the Schrems II ruling place strict requirements on how and where data is stored. The invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield and concerns around the U.S. CLOUD Act, potentially allowing U.S. authorities to access data held by American companies even when the data resides in Europe, have raised red flags for businesses operating in the EU.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB)’s further tightening of cross-border data transfer rules reinforces this point: for many organizations, storing data within the EU isn’t just good practice; it’s legally required.
That’s why companies are looking closely at European providers like Leaseweb, designed to meet EU regulatory demands while offering the performance, flexibility, and control enterprises need.
Why Choose a European Cloud Provider?
Beyond compliance, working with a European cloud provider brings practical advantages:
- Cost-efficiency: Competitive pricing and clearer billing models.
- Avoiding Vendor Lock-in: Freedom to migrate workloads seamlessly between providers.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance: Local providers often understand regional compliance needs better.
- Local Support and Responsiveness: Immediate, culturally attuned support and technical assistance.
Underneath all four of these sits one legal reality that is worth explaining clearly, because it is the real reason the sovereignty conversation exists at all.
The CLOUD Act versus EU law: why the provider matters more than the data center
The U.S. CLOUD Act, in force since 2018, allows U.S. authorities to compel American cloud providers to hand over data in their possession, custody, or control, regardless of where in the world that data is physically stored. The important detail is that it applies based on the provider’s nationality, not the data’s location. A U.S.-owned provider running a data center in Frankfurt or Amsterdam can still fall within the scope of a U.S. demand. In other words, an EU data center address changes the geography, but not the jurisdiction.
On the European side, two instruments push in the opposite direction. GDPR has governed access to personal data since 2018, and its Article 48 makes clear that a foreign court order is not, by itself, a lawful basis to transfer EU data. The EU Data Act, which entered into force in January 2024 and applies from September 2025, goes further: it requires cloud providers operating in the EU to put technical, legal, and organizational measures in place to prevent unlawful non-EU government access to data held in the EU, and to challenge access requests that conflict with EU law. It also strengthens the right to switch providers, directly targeting vendor lock-in.
This is where a genuinely European provider changes the equation. With a company like Leaseweb, the data is not only stored in the EU, the operating company, the staff, and the legal entity are European too, so there is no U.S. parent that a CLOUD Act order can reach. For a U.S.-owned hyperscaler, sovereignty features and “EU data boundary” branding can reduce exposure, but they cannot remove the underlying fact that the parent company remains subject to U.S. law. As the sources in this debate put it consistently, the question has shifted from “where is the data stored?” to “who controls the operations, the keys, and the legal entity?”. That distinction is exactly why the four advantages above matter in practice, and not just on paper.
| Category | EU Cloud Providers (e.g., Leaseweb) | Non-EU Cloud Providers (Hyperscalers) |
|---|---|---|
| Data Sovereignty | All data stored and processed within the EU | Data may be stored across global regions |
| Legal Jurisdiction | Fully under EU laws (GDPR, NIS2, Schrems II) | Subject to U.S. laws (e.g., CLOUD Act) |
| Compliance | GDPR, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 1, NEN 7510 | Requires complex agreements for EU alignment |
| Data Transfer Risk | No cross-border transfer risks | Transatlantic transfer risks, legal exposure |
| Transparency | Open APIs, Terraform, clear billing | Opaque pricing, proprietary platforms |
| Vendor Lock-In | Avoided with open standards and portability | High switching costs and complexity |
| Support & Responsiveness | Local EU-based teams, fast SLA response | Global queues, potentially delayed EU support |
| Ideal For | Regulated industries, MSPs, EU-based orgs | Large-scale global workloads |
Rising Challenges Driving Cloud Strategy Changes
Escalating Cyber Threats
Ransomware remains one of the most urgent concerns for IT leaders. In 2025, it was present in 44% of all confirmed data breaches, up from 32% a year earlier (Verizon DBIR 2025), and the average cost of a ransomware attack reached $5.08 million (IBM 2025). Traditional backup solutions are no longer enough; modern ransomware strains target backups directly and leverage zero-day exploits to cause maximum disruption.
Increasing Regulatory Pressure
Different industries face their own strict compliance frameworks:
- Healthcare: The EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and national standards like the Dutch NEN 7510 demand encrypted storage, data residency, and strict access control mechanisms.
- Finance: PCI-DSS and PSD2 compliance require audit-ready logging, secure APIs, and fraud prevention capabilities.
- Public Sector: National sovereignty guidelines increasingly require infrastructure operated by EU entities under EU jurisdiction.
Leaseweb addresses these demands with infrastructure hosted in certified data centers, backed by ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 1, HIPAA, and NEN 7510 certifications.
Vendor Lock-In and Cloud Cost Surprises
Cloud cost visibility is another growing issue. Hyperscalers often rely on:
- Opaque pricing models
- High egress fees
- Unpredictable costs for API usage and storage tiers
Studies show that enterprises waste a significant share of their cloud budget due to a lack of cost governance and hidden fees. Proprietary platforms also make migration complex and expensive, increasing lock-in risk.
Leaseweb’s approach counters this with transparent, predictable pricing. Snapshots, private networking, and DDoS protection are included free of charge, and flexible billing models (traffic-based, 95th percentile, or unmetered) mean there are no surprises at the end of the month.
Introducing Leaseweb
Leaseweb is a Dutch cloud infrastructure provider operating since 1997. Founded by two Dutch airline pilots, Con Zwinkels and Laurens Rosenthal, the company started in Utrecht with a handful of servers and grew into one of Europe’s largest independent cloud providers. Today, Leaseweb is headquartered in Amsterdam, is part of the OCOM group, and serves more than 17,500 customers worldwide, from startups and SMBs to SaaS companies, gaming studios, and large enterprises.
The company expanded through organic growth and strategic acquisitions, including Netdirekt in Germany, Nobis Technology Group/Ubiquity Hosting and ServInt in the US, and iWeb in Canada, building a global footprint while keeping its European foundation.
Some key numbers behind the platform:
- 28 data centers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Oceania
- 80,000+ servers under management
- A private global network with 10+ Tbps bandwidth capacity, 43 Points of Presence, and 29 Internet Exchanges, peered with over 2,000 networks
- 99.999% core network uptime and a 99.99% uptime SLA on Public Cloud
What makes Leaseweb stand out is the combination of European headquarters and jurisdiction with genuine global reach: you can run sovereign workloads in Amsterdam or Frankfurt, and still serve users in Asia or North America from the same platform and portal.
Key Technologies and Offerings
Leaseweb is a broad Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider. Cloud is one pillar of a portfolio that spans bare metal to fully managed private cloud:
- Dedicated Servers (Bare Metal): Leaseweb’s heritage and core business. High-performance single-tenant servers on enterprise hardware from Dell, HP, NetApp, Arista, and Juniper, with the latest Intel Xeon and AMD processors, month-to-month contracts, and rapid deployment.
- Public Cloud: On-demand virtual instances in General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, and GPU Optimized flavors, on fast SSD/NVMe storage. Auto-scaling, load balancers, and an EC2-compatible API for automation. Available in 10 locations including Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Montreal, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney, with hourly or monthly billing and a 99.99% uptime SLA.
- Private Cloud: Multiple flavors depending on the level of isolation and control needed, including VMware vCloud (multi-tenant, managed via vCloud Director) and dedicated VMware vSphere environments with customizable resource pools, role-based access control, and NSX-based networking.
- VPS: Cost-effective virtual private servers for smaller workloads, development, and test environments.
- Object Storage: S3-compatible storage for backups, media, and application data, plus central block storage for cloud instances.
- Hybrid Cloud / Cloud Connect: Connect dedicated servers and cloud instances over free private networking within a data center, isolated from the internet, cost-effective, and secure. This hybrid model is one of Leaseweb’s signature strengths.
- GPU and AI Infrastructure: Dedicated GPU servers and GPU-optimized cloud instances with NVIDIA L4, L40S, and H100 NVL GPUs for AI training and inference workloads.
- CDN: A next-generation content delivery network for global distribution of websites, video, and software downloads.
- Security Services: Free DDoS protection included with all products, firewall filtering, and 24/7 security operations.
VMware Cloud Foundation: A Sovereign Alternative for Private Cloud
This is the part of Leaseweb’s story that matters most to my own day-to-day work, and right now it is one of the company’s strongest positions in the market, so it is worth going into properly rather than in passing.
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware reshaped the entire partner ecosystem. The old VMware partner program was replaced by an invitation-only model with far fewer partners, and many providers either did not have their contracts renewed or could not meet the new tier requirements. In that context, in July 2026 Leaseweb was named a VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) Pinnacle partner in the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program, the highest tier available, across the European Economic Area, Singapore, and the United States. Only a small number of providers hold this status.
What Pinnacle status actually means
Pinnacle is not a badge. It is a direct working relationship with Broadcom that includes access to their support infrastructure, escalation paths, and product roadmap. For customers, that translates into a fully supported, authorized path to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), delivered by a provider that transacts with Broadcom directly rather than through intermediaries. As Broadcom continues to reshape the VMware ecosystem, that direct line and that certainty are exactly what infrastructure teams are asking for, because renewals, licensing, and long-term strategy are all live questions right now.
The ITQ partnership and acquisition
Leaseweb paired the Pinnacle status with two moves in the same month. First, a partnership with ITQ(my previous employer), a Netherlands-headquartered Broadcom specialist and one of Europe’s most experienced VMware advisory and migration firms. Under the agreement, ITQ selected Leaseweb as its VCF infrastructure partner, with Leaseweb providing the VCF 9.x platform and ITQ acting as the knowledge and migration partner, bringing the advisory and implementation expertise that takes customers through migration and deployment.
Second, Leaseweb acquired ITQ’s white-label VCSP customer base. This transitions 51 service providers and approximately 35,000 cores onto Leaseweb’s VCF platform, bringing the company to around 65,000 VCF cores under management. That makes Leaseweb the largest VMware Pinnacle partner in the Netherlands, and the company has stated its ambition to become the largest across Europe.
The partnership also covers ITQ’s Broadcom VMware VCSP partners across Europe. For service providers whose Broadcom contracts were not renewed but who want to keep their VMware-based services running, the two companies position this as a secure foundation and a way to ensure continuity, rather than being forced to re-platform under time pressure.
Why this matters for VMware customers
Put together, this gives VMware customers a few concrete advantages that are hard to find elsewhere in Europe right now:
- Continuity without re-platforming: existing VMware and VCF workloads keep running on the same technology stack, on an authorized platform, without a forced migration to a different hypervisor or a different operating model.
- A modern private cloud: VCF is a single platform for virtual machines, containers, and AI workloads, with one operating model across data center, edge, and managed cloud. Customers get modern private cloud capabilities with cost control, rather than a legacy vSphere estate they have to maintain themselves.
- Sovereign by design: the VCF platform is delivered from European infrastructure under EU jurisdiction, with data residency and jurisdictional controls, which is increasingly a hard requirement for regulated and public-sector workloads.
- Expert-led migration: through ITQ, customers get advisory and migration services from a team that does VMware migrations for a living, not just raw infrastructure.
- Direct Broadcom support: escalation paths and roadmap access through a Pinnacle-tier relationship, rather than being several steps removed from the vendor.
A path off the hyperscalers, and off self-managed VMware
There are two migration stories here, and both are relevant. The first is organizations that want to move from hyperscalers to a European VCF platform, to regain jurisdictional control, make costs more predictable, and avoid lock-in, while still running a modern private cloud. The second is organizations running their own VMware estates, or sitting with a VCSP whose contract was not renewed, who need a supported, sovereign home for those workloads. Leaseweb’s VCF offering is aimed squarely at both.
One honest note for balance. The wider industry conversation around VMware sovereignty includes a caveat worth knowing: because Broadcom is a US company, some observers, including the CISPE association, point out that a VMware-based stack is not sovereign in the strictest legal sense. That is a fair point about the software layer. Where Leaseweb adds value is the infrastructure, jurisdiction, operations, and data residency around that stack, all of which sit in Europe and under European control.
That said, VMware is one pillar of a much broader portfolio, as the sections above show, not the whole story. But for anyone reassessing their VMware strategy in 2026, it is a genuinely strong reason to put Leaseweb on the shortlist.
Compliance, Security, and Sovereignty
Leaseweb calls its sovereignty approach “Sovereignty by Design”, and it rests on a few concrete pillars:
- European jurisdiction: As a European-headquartered provider, Leaseweb’s Dutch and EU operations are governed by EU law, so data hosted in its European data centers is not subject to non-European legislation like the U.S. CLOUD Act.
- Local sales entities: Leaseweb operates through locally governed legal entities in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, the US, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia, each bound by its own jurisdiction, giving customers full clarity about which legal framework governs their infrastructure.
- Operational sovereignty: Locally based infrastructure managed by local staff, keeping operations under the same jurisdiction as the data.
Leaseweb backs this with active participation in the European sovereignty ecosystem. Leaseweb describes itself as the only Dutch cloud provider participating directly in IPCEI-CIS, the EU innovation program for cloud infrastructure and services, and is developing the European Cloud Campus, a project aimed at a cost-effective, sovereign European cloud environment. The company is a member of CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe), Gaia-X, EuroStack, and the Dutch Cloud Community, and participates in CISPE’s Sovereignty Certification Framework, launched in July 2025.
On certifications, Leaseweb holds a set of third-party audited credentials (exact scope varies by facility):
- ISO 27001:2022, information security management, certified by EY CertifyPoint
- PCI DSS v4.0, for payment card industry workloads
- SOC 1 Type II, ISAE 3402 assurance reports, audited by EY
- HIPAA, for healthcare-related workloads
- NEN 7510, the Dutch standard for information security in healthcare
Backup as a Service and Protection Against Ransomware
Ransomware remains one of the most critical threats to cloud workloads, and traditional backup strategies that depend on external agents or third-party storage are no longer sufficient on their own.
Leaseweb integrates backup directly into its platform rather than leaving it as an afterthought:
- Acronis-powered Backup as a Service for public cloud workloads, automated, agent-based protection of virtual instances with flexible retention and granular restore options.
- Veeam-powered Backup as a Service for VMware private cloud environments, the industry-standard choice for VMware workloads, integrated into the vCloud Director and vSphere offerings.
- Zerto-powered Disaster Recovery as a Service for VMware environments, continuous data protection with near-zero RPOs and rapid failover for business-critical workloads.
Combined with free snapshot management, redundant storage, and the ability to span workloads across multiple data centers over Leaseweb’s private network, this gives organizations a cohesive recovery architecture: protect against accidental deletion, system corruption, and cyberattacks, and recover to a specific point in time with minimal RPO/RTO, all within the same jurisdiction as the production data.
Real-World Use Cases: How Organizations Leverage Leaseweb
AFAS Software: Continuous Hosting for a SaaS ERP Platform
Dutch software company AFAS serves hundreds of thousands of business users with its ERP platform and needed continuous hosting infrastructure with high uptime. “Dell recommended Leaseweb, and they were the only provider on the market that offered what we were looking for,” the company explains. Leaseweb’s combination of enterprise hardware, network uptime, and direct engineer access underpins AFAS’s always-on SaaS delivery.
Crytek: Low-Latency Infrastructure for Gaming
The game developer behind Crysis and Hunt: Showdown runs latency-sensitive gaming workloads where small infrastructure problems have a big player-facing impact. “You feel like the customer value at Leaseweb is very high. Small problems can have a big impact on our games, so we need a partner like Leaseweb.” High-bandwidth, low-latency networking and free DDoS protection are the foundation here, both critical for online gaming.
Intrastores: E-commerce at Competitive Cost
With dozens of specialty online retail outlets to support, e-commerce company Intrastores tightly manages capacity through Leaseweb’s global infrastructure “at very competitive prices,” achieving significant monthly savings compared to its previous setup while keeping the flexibility to scale with seasonal retail demand.
Final Thoughts
Europe vs the US, and Private Cloud vs the Hyperscalers
Part of my work is analyzing this type of market. Alongside writing here, I work as an industry analyst, which means I spend a good deal of my time tracking where cloud infrastructure spending is going, how the regulatory picture is shifting, and how providers are positioning against each other. So rather than close with a simple summary, I want to step back from any single provider and share how I read the market right now, because the shift underneath all of this is real, and it is accelerating.
For most of the last two decades, the default answer to “where should this run?” was a US hyperscaler. That default is now being questioned. As of 2025, three US providers held around 70 percent of the European cloud infrastructure market, while European providers together held roughly 15 percent. But the direction of travel has changed. Analyst forecasts put European sovereign cloud IaaS spending growth at around 83 percent in 2026, from roughly 6.9 billion to 12.6 billion dollars, with the figure nearly doubling again in 2027. Surveys of European IT leaders consistently show a majority wanting to increase their use of local providers. This is no longer a policy aspiration; it is turning into procurement decisions.
Two forces are driving it. The first is Europe versus the US as a question of jurisdiction. As I covered earlier, the issue is not where a data center sits; it is which legal system the operator answers to. GDPR, the EU Data Act, NIS2, and DORA are all pushing organizations to be able to prove, not just assert, that their data stays under European control. For regulated industries, the public sector, and critical infrastructure, that proof is becoming a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have. A genuinely European provider, with a European parent, European staff, and European legal entities, can answer that question in a way that a US-owned provider with an EU region cannot fully match.
The second force is private cloud versus the hyperscalers as a question of model. For years, the assumption was that everything would end up on public cloud. That assumption is softening. Rising and unpredictable public cloud bills, egress fees, and the loss of control over the stack have made a modern private cloud attractive again, especially for steady-state, business-critical workloads that do not need infinite elasticity. The difference from the old days is that private cloud no longer means a static estate you babysit yourself. A platform like VMware Cloud Foundation gives you virtual machines, containers, and AI on a single operating model, delivered as a managed service, with the economics and the control that many organizations feel they lost when they moved everything to public cloud.
This is exactly the intersection I find most interesting as an analyst, and it happens to be where Leaseweb sits. I will be transparent about wearing two hats here: the market read above is my analyst view, and what follows is my personal opinion as someone who also works at the company. Leaseweb pairs European jurisdiction and a concrete sovereignty strategy with a broad hybrid portfolio that runs from bare metal to GPU cloud, and it now offers a modern, managed VMware Cloud Foundation private cloud on top of that. For an organization asking both questions at once- how do I regain control of jurisdiction, and how do I run a modern private cloud without going back to managing everything myself- that combination is still relatively rare in the European market.
None of this means the hyperscalers disappear. They will keep dominating large-scale, elastic, and AI-training workloads for years, and for many organizations a US public cloud remains a perfectly reasonable choice. The realistic future is hybrid: the right workload in the right place, with sovereignty and cost driving more of those placement decisions than they used to. The point is simply that the European, private-cloud option is now credible on jurisdiction, on control, and increasingly on price and performance, in a way it was not a few years ago.
With nearly three decades of operation, 28 data centers, a serious global network, a broad hybrid portfolio, a modern VCF-based private cloud, and a concrete sovereignty strategy, Leaseweb has earned a place on the shortlist when you next rethink where your infrastructure should live. As always, do your own evaluation against your own requirements; that is the only assessment that matters.
Leaseweb Public Cloud offers a two-month Public Cloud free trial if you want to test it yourself.
In the next post of this series, I will look at another European cloud provider. Suggestions are welcome in the comments; leave them here or contact me on Twitter (yes, for me it’s not X, but still Twitter) or LinkedIn, since I am getting off Twitter.
