UK IT leaders want out of US clouds but only 15% have moved, Civo finds
Civo’s own survey of 1,000 UK IT leaders shows 73% call sovereignty a strategic priority and 28% expect to lean harder on the hyperscalers anyway. A panel at the vendor’s London event blamed inertia and the pull of AI
- 73% of respondents call data sovereignty a strategic priority, up 12 points from 61% in Civo’s 2025 survey.
- 28% expect to deepen their reliance on US hyperscalers, up from 12% a year earlier.
- 39% suffered an outage originating with a US hyperscaler in the year before the survey and 15% suffered several.
- Among those hit by outages, 40% put their exposure above £50,000 and 5% above £1m.
- Only 35% say they have full clarity on where their data is located and governed.
For businesses weighing a move off a US hyperscaler, resilience looks like the practical starting point rather than sovereignty. An exit plan, a map of where data actually sits and a costed UK-hosted fallback for critical workloads are likely to cost less than a full migration and address the outage risk directly. Buyers testing domestic suppliers should demand a compute price, a migration plan and a clear answer on AI tooling before treating sovereignty as a reason to switch.
“UK leaders clearly want to break free from Big Tech dependency, but find themselves trapped by an ever-tightening web.”Mark Boost, chief executive, Civo
Two-thirds (66%) of UK IT leaders would consider switching cloud provider, but only 15% have moved workloads to a domestic alternative, according to Civo’s survey of 1,000 UK IT leaders, released in June. The research is Civo’s own: the UK cloud provider commissioned it for the 2026 edition of its white paper, The Digital Sovereignty Revolution, and neither the release nor the report names the firm that ran the fieldwork.
Civo sells sovereign cloud against the US hyperscalers, and on 22 September announced the first of 40 planned UK edge data centers, so it has a stake in the answer. Its numbers still describe a market that has decided and not acted: three-quarters of respondents doubt they could exit a major US provider, and 43% cite high compute costs as a primary barrier to domestic alternatives. The report calls the running cost of staying put a ‘sovereignty tax’, while conceding the term is not an official one.
Inertia and the pull of AI
That gap was the subject of a panel at Civo Navigate London on 22 September, as reported by Diginomica. Dan Chester, global director at Vast Data, compared enterprises to an oil tanker and said it is “very difficult for enterprises to pivot back suddenly”. Paul Drayson, chairman of Locai Labs and a former science and defense minister, called sovereignty the country’s most pressing political issue, but acknowledged that rising AI performance makes it harder to act on. Richard Woodfield, head of solution services at DataVita, said firms yet to migrate should safeguard what they can, and Ed Barker, founder of advisory firm Havishams, urged IT leaders to frame sovereignty as business risk.
Sources
- Diginomica, “Civo Navigate: if digital sovereignty really is a priority for non-US businesses, why are more of them giving more business to the hyperscalers?”, Mark Samuels, 25 September 2026. https://diginomica.com/civo-navigate-if-digital-sovereignty-really-priority-agenda-item-non-us-businesses-why-are-more
- Civo, “Two-thirds of UK businesses want to switch cloud providers”, press release, 30 June 2026. https://www.civo.com/newsroom/uk-businesses-want-to-switch-cloud-providers
- Civo, The Digital Sovereignty Revolution 2026 white paper (PDF hosted by OpenUK), June 2026. https://openuk.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/The-Digital-Sovereignty-Revolution-2026.pdf
- Civo, Mark Boost blog post on the 2026 survey findings, 10 June 2026. https://www.civo.com/blog/uk-cloud-dependency-geopolitical-risk-2026
- Civo, Civo Navigate London 2026 event page (22 September 2026, Convene 155 Bishopsgate). https://www.civo.com/navigate/london/2026
- Civo, “Civo unveils first of 40 UK edge data centres built to power sovereign AI compute”, press release, 22 September 2026. https://www.civo.com/newsroom/civo-unveils-first-of-40-uk-edge-data-centres
