Today was an important milestone in our journey toward creating the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud. Earlier this year, we announced a new commitment for our public sector and commercial customers in the EU and EFTA: a promise to enable them to process and store all their data in the EU by the end of 2022. Our services continue to operate in compliance with European laws and regulations. But with this ambitious plan we are going above and beyond our prior commitments and regulatory requirements to meet our customers’ preferences and expectations for increased data residency and control and to help Europe realize its digital ambitions.
Since our initial announcement in May, we’ve begun the necessary engineering work and gathered feedback to better understand and adjust to customer needs and priorities. These discussions have reconfirmed just how important data, and control over data, is for our EU customers—to confidently embrace the cloud and foster data-driven innovation. These conversations have also reinforced the profound responsibility we have as a custodian of that data.
Building on what we’ve heard from our customers, today we convened an EU Cloud Customer Summit to share additional details about our progress and what’s next. The updates we provided, as well as our ongoing plans, reflect the customer feedback we’ve received over past months, and today’s discussion provided yet another opportunity for our customers to help shape the path ahead.
Here are some of the investments Microsoft is making for the EU Data Boundary by the end of 2022.
Data centers are at the core of customers’ processing and storage capabilities. We already have the world’s largest cloud infrastructure, with more than 60 datacenter regions announced to date, and we are adding more data centers and increasing capacity in our existing data centers in the EU. Since May, we’ve opened a new data center in Sweden and announced an additional site in Belgium offering local data residency and faster access to the cloud
