Can Europe have both innovation and data sovereignty? As cloud adoption accelerates across the continent, TechSense magazine sat down with Anthony Wackens, AWS Head of European Organisations, and Quentin Bechoux, Senior Manager from PwC Luxembourg's Cloud & Digital Sovereignty team. Together, they explored how the AWS and PwC collaboration helps public sector and regulated organisations modernise IT infrastructure without compromising on trust. 

Why Luxembourg matters 

Anthony: Luxembourg is a great place to live, work, and invest. It has been Amazon’s European HQ since 2003. As a major financial centre and home to many EU institutions, Luxembourg is a crucial hub for AWS and for our clients, and it plays a key role in our strategy across Europe and the entire EMEA region. 

I’m also impressed by how Luxembourg has evolved from a primarily financial hub to a real technology and innovation centre for Europe. We're seeing more of our public sector and financial services clients move beyond exploratory cloud projects into full-scale cloud-native transformation. The question is no longer whether they should move to the cloud, but rather how to do it securely, with clear governance and compliance. 

Quentin: You’re right, Luxembourg has a unique concentration of investment fund administrators, private banks, insurance groups, and European institutions. Our clients at PwC Luxembourg are looking not just for cloud infrastructure, but also for partners who understand the local and international regulations. This intersection of deep business domain expertise and cloud capability is exactly what makes our collaboration with AWS so successful. 

Investment and innovation 

Anthony: Luxembourg is a strategic hub for us, where AWS and Amazon have invested over €10 billion in the past decade. We also support the local job market, education, research, and community initiatives. 

Quentin: These initiatives send a clear market signal, and our clients are paying attention. For companies operating in Luxembourg, the long-term, on-the-ground commitment of Amazon demonstrates stability, scale, and a willingness to invest in the local digital ecosystem over the long run. 

Anthony: Luxembourg’s government keeps the momentum going by consistently investing in the country’s digital future, driving initiatives such as the national cloud strategy that position Luxembourg as a trusted data-economy hub within the EU. 

Quentin: This alignment between public ambition and private investment has resulted in Luxembourg’s Investment Tax Credit (ITC). It provides real incentives for technology modernisation, including cloud infrastructure, automation, innovative AI projects, or even simple digital transformation. In practical terms, the government incentives companies to modernise and scale their digital foundations in Luxembourg. 

At PwC, we help clients navigate this intersection of technology, regulation, and business transformation. Our role is to ensure cloud transformation programmes are not only secure and compliant, but also architecturally robust and financially efficient, allowing organisations to modernise with the full benefit of the Luxembourg framework.

Public sector transformation 

Anthony: Working with multiple public sector organisations across the EU, I can see how cloud technology helps them provide easier access to citizen services, improve healthcare, and modernise education. However, they often face data residency requirements, strict security expectations, and budget constraints. AWS offers EU-based regions that ensure data residency and automated compliance, serving customers such as the European Commission, the University of Luxembourg, and the Belgian Ministry of Finance. 

Quentin: Across Europe, the public sector is facing a transformation agenda that is increasingly technical, highly regulated, and deeply intertwined with national sovereignty. At PwC, we see that this transformation operates on two inseparable fronts. 

On the one hand, public institutions must address technology foundations: modernising infrastructure to access innovative services such as AI, securing workloads, implementing cloud-native identity models, strengthening data governance, and building the operational resilience now expected across the EU. On the other hand, governance and regulatory compliance create the need to navigate procurement rules, accountability requirements, sovereignty expectations, and large-scale organisational change. 

Anthony: AWS provides the trusted, EU-aligned cloud capabilities needed to support this shift. PwC complements it by supplying the frameworks, methodologies, and sector expertise to deploy those capabilities safely and credibly. Together, we support governments and public institutions in redesigning their cloud operating models, modernising procurement processes, training technical and non-technical staff, and ensuring alignment with key EU regulations such as GDPR, DORA, NIS2, and emerging AI governance frameworks. 

Quentin: It’s striking how closely the public sector challenge mirrors what regulated financial institutions face. For Luxembourg’s banks, insurers, and asset managers, the CSSF’s cloud outsourcing requirements and DORA’s operational resilience obligations create a compliance environment that can easily overwhelm organisations, especially those without large internal IT teams. This is where PwC’s Cloud Governance Framework and professional services add so much value. 

In today’s market, proper cloud governance is no longer optional. And it’s precisely at this intersection of technology, regulation, and operational execution that the AWS and PwC collaboration delivers unique, high-impact value for both public institutions and financial actors. 

AWS European Sovereign Cloud 

Anthony: This is exactly why we built AWS European Sovereign Cloud. This new AWS Region is located in Brandenburg, Germany, and it’s physically and logically separated from other AWS Regions, with all the operations located in the EU. It is designed for governments and enterprises that need the highest levels of data sovereignty and operational independence. We also plan to extend this footprint with Local Zones in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal. 

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a turning point for EU institutions, national administrations, and financial actors dealing with highly sensitive workloads. It finally provides the structural separation, operational autonomy, and EU-governed control that organisations have been demanding for years. 

But adopting sovereign cloud requires more than choosing a new region. It requires alignment across three pillars: data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and technology sovereignty. 

A sovereign cloud delivers all the hyperscale benefits — innovation, automation, resiliency — while helping organisations protect sensitive data, comply with regulatory obligations, and mitigate geopolitical and supply chain risks. 

Quentin: Where AWS provides sovereign by design, PwC ensures sovereign by operation. We help clients design sovereign cloud strategies, classify data and workloads, perform regulatory impact assessments, architect hybrid and sovereign cloud environments, implement auditability, transparency, and trust controls, and establish governance models aligned with EU expectations. 

Not all workloads require sovereign grade hosting, so our engagements start with the requirements assessment ensuring that these measures are applied exactly where they are needed. This produces architectures that meet stringent regulations, while staying optimised for cost and performance. 

One recent example is our work with a large EU financial institution, where PwC delivered a full Cloud Adoption Framework and workload readiness assessment, including identifying which assets required sovereign deployment. Across all business sectors, the lesson is clear: cloud transformation succeeds fastest and safest when sovereignty, governance, and architecture are engineered together. 

Why partnerships matter 

Anthony: Implementing the Sovereign Cloud requires a robust network of AWS Partners that can provide compliance expertise, deep domain knowledge, and organisational change management. 

The AWS and PwC collaboration goes beyond technical deployment. Together, we help clients tackle the full spectrum of sovereign cloud adoption (regulatory, architectural, operational, and organisational). A great example is our joint work with the European Parliament to transform its historical archive using ArchiBot, making 450,000 documents easily searchable, reducing search time by 80%. 

Quentin: On top of that, PwC brings the expertise needed to operationalise sovereignty, including regulatory advisory (finance, public sector, data protection, AI governance), programme delivery, cybersecurity, identity management, and cloud strategy. Our customers want organisation-wide transformation where technology, governance, people, and compliance progress together. 

Our inclusion in the AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency reflects this integrated approach. In practice, we work across two dimensions: strategic and architectural. 

This combined framework meets the regulators’ expectations, and it enables customers to move quickly and confidently. Our recent engagements in Luxembourg’s financial sector show the impact: from cloud transformation roadmaps to governance models validated by internal risk committees and supervisory authorities. Ultimately, AWS brings the innovation. PwC ensures it is deployed securely, compliantly, and sustainably in Europe’s most demanding regulatory environments, bringing real value to the organisations.

Anthony: The AWS and PwC collaboration helps Europe move toward a trusted and innovation-driven cloud era. AWS delivers world-class technology and infrastructure. PwC ensures those capabilities integrate with European regulations, business realities, and the needs of public institutions and enterprises. Together, we are shaping a cloud model where sovereignty and innovation complement each other.

Anthony Wackens | LinkedIn
Quentin Bechoux | LinkedIn

Want to know more? Contact us PwC Luxembourg & Amazon Web Services (AWS)