Google Goes Sovereign, AWS Cuts Services, and Oracle Continues To Find a Way

This Week in Cloud — November 13, 2025

Welcome back to The Cloud Cover, your essential guide to navigating the dynamic world of cloud for Solutions Architects, engineers, and IT leaders. This week, the abstract concepts of "data privacy" and "digital sovereignty" stopped being legal buzzwords and started shipping as hard products. Meanwhile, AWS began an aggressive—and for many, disruptive—house-cleaning, while Oracle landed a heavyweight contract that validates its multicloud strategy. Let’s dive in.

For years, "sovereignty" has been more of a topic presented by thought leaders than a critical customer requirement. Recently, though, data residency and privacy have become a core, high-margin product differentiator.

Google made the most aggressive move this week, announcing its first-ever Sovereign Cloud Hub in Munich, Germany. This isn't just a new region. They are building a hands-on facility designed as a co-location and partner-managed ecosystem (with partners like T-Systems) to provide a "sovereignty-in-a-box" solution. Google is backing this with a massive €5.5 billion (approx. $6.4B USD) investment in Germany for new data centers and AI infrastructure through 2029.

More importantly, Google paired this physical launch with a technical one: "Private AI Compute" for its Gemini models. This new service is explicitly designed to counter fears of data leakage by running inference in a "secure, fortified space" using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This is a strategic pivot—moving the sales pitch from a contractual promise not to train on your data to a hardware-enforced guarantee.

Microsoft is right in the mix, having just announced its own expanded sovereign cloud capabilities. This includes end-to-end AI data processing within its EU Data Boundary and in-country Copilot support for 15 nations. And, Oracle also offers a variety of ways to run their infrastructure while supporting sovereignty requirements, while AWS lags behind, promising an EU sovereignty solution by the end of the year.

This is the new competitive landscape. It's no longer just about where your data lives, but how it's isolated, who can access it, and what technical proof a provider can offer.

🔍 The Rundown

📈 Trending Now: Oracle’s “Detente” Strategy Is Working

For the last decade, the cloud war was about picking one winner. Oracle, meanwhile, was often seen as the legacy incumbent everyone was trying to migrate away from.

No longer. Oracle is executing a brilliant "detente" strategy: if you can't beat them, partner with them. Instead of forcing a full-stack migration, Oracle is unbundling its crown jewel—the Oracle Database—and co-locating it with its biggest rivals.

This week, we saw this strategy in full execution. The Oracle Database@Azure service is now Generally Available in over 28 regions. In the same week, Google was hosting its global launch tour for "Oracle Database@Google Cloud" , a partnership enabled by new, dedicated interconnects like the one just lit up between OCI's Phoenix region and Google's Los Angeles region.

This "Trojan Horse" strategy is a win-win-win. Oracle keeps its high-margin database customers, Azure and GCP get to migrate the lucrative Oracle application workloads, and customers get a low-latency, "best-of-both-worlds" architecture.

📅 Event Radar

👋 Until Next Week

That's a wrap. This week was a reminder that platform risk is real. For every exciting new launch, there's a disruptive deprecation (looking at you, AWS and GCP). The amount of migration work just created by the AWS service consolidation is staggering.

With AWS re:Invent just around the corner, this aggressive house-cleaning feels like clearing the decks for a new wave of (likely AI-focused) services. Stay tuned.

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