The deteriorating relationship between Europe and the US is reshaping how the continent thinks about its digital infrastructure — and a new productivity platform launched in The Hague is betting that the shift is now irreversible.
Office.eu, a cloud-based office suite built entirely on open-source software and hosted exclusively on European servers, has launched as a direct competitor to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Its pitch is straightforward: keep data in the EU, run on transparent open-source components and comply with EU law by design.
Europe’s dependence on American technology has become a frontline issue in a geopolitical environment that has shifted dramatically since Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Trump alarmed Europe by imposing tariffs after returning to office and caused further alarm with his provocative refusal to rule out military action to acquire Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory.
The fallout has accelerated what was already a slow-burning push for digital sovereignty across the continent. Estonia’s minister for digital affairs, Liisa Pakosta, told CNBC the country’s drive to accelerate its “open-source first” strategy comes amid “heightened security threats on Europe’s eastern flank”, calling digital sovereignty “a matter of national survival, not just IT policy”.
All 27 EU member states signed a declaration in November stating their “shared ambition to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty” and reduce “strategic dependencies”, CNBC reported. Meanwhile, spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure in Europe is forecast to more than triple to US$23-billion by 2027, according to research firm Gartner.
Hosted at Hetzner
It is against this backdrop that Office.eu has entered the market. The platform combines file storage, e-mail, calendar, document editing, chat and video conferencing in a single browser-based interface. The collaborative engine is powered by Nextcloud Hub, while document editing runs on Collabora Online, a professional implementation of the open-source LibreOffice codebase.
Critically, the entire stack runs on EU-only data centres — specifically using the German provider Hetzner — with European ownership and governance to keep customer data under European law and away from foreign legal reach, including the US Cloud Act.
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The US Cloud Act, signed into law in 2018, gives American law enforcement the authority to compel US-based technology companies to hand over data stored on their servers regardless of where in the world that data is physically located. For European governments and regulated industries, this creates an uncomfortable tension with the EU’s own data protection framework.
Denmark’s data protection authority ordered municipalities to curb Google Workspace in schools over transfer risks, and France’s digital authorities have urged public entities to prefer solutions that meet strict sovereignty and security standards.
Maarten Roelfs, CEO of Office.eu, has framed the launch as a necessary intervention. In an interview with Silicon Republic, Roelfs said: “The Rubicon has been crossed. American tech firms can no longer offer assurances to European companies that their data sovereignty will be protected.
“For many years, Europe has relied on American software and therefore created a certain risk of dependency, but we have also given away the control over our own data. Office.eu proves that we now have a strong European alternative, with sovereignty, privacy and transparency at its core,” Roelfs said.
The platform is not the only initiative of its kind. France has reportedly begun replacing US-based collaboration tools across government agencies, and Germany’s state of Schleswig-Holstein is migrating tens of thousands of workstations to open-source stacks. Denmark said it would launch a pilot of an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office for some government employees in June, CNBC reported.
Office.eu’s challenge, however, remains formidable. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace still set the bar for breadth, offering deep integration across video, white-boarding, low-code automation and sprawling partner ecosystems. Office.eu does not promise feature parity. Its bet is that for a growing number of European organisations, control and compliance now matter more than convenience.
Early access has attracted nearly 15 000 applicants, Office.eu told Silicon Republic, with a phased European roll-out planned for the second quarter of 2026. Pricing is expected to be comparable to or lower than the entry-level tiers of Microsoft 365, which typically starts at around €5.50 per user per month.
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Whether Office.eu can meaningfully dent the dominance of the US incumbents remains to be seen. But the political winds are now blowing firmly in its direction. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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