Who's pulling the strings? The digital Pax Americana: The stealthy takeover – How US tech giants and the CLOUD Act control Europe

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Co.: The sinister network behind America's tech superpower

The end of naivety: Were the USA always just false friends for Europe?

Europe stands on the brink of unprecedented dependence – not through military occupation, but through server farms, algorithms, and American legislation. For decades, the continent has indulged in the illusion of an equal transatlantic partnership, while American technology companies, in close collaboration with US intelligence agencies, have built an unprecedented digital hegemony. From covert data access through the CLOUD Act to CIA-funded surveillance software in German police forces and massive dominance in the future market of artificial intelligence: Europe has de facto relinquished its digital sovereignty. But this technological subjugation is no accident. It is the result of a ruthless, ideologically driven power politics, spearheaded by multi-billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: We were never equal partners – we have long since become digital vassals of a foreign power structure. A profound analysis of the end of European naiveté and the last chance for genuine resistance.

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• Hardly any regulatory act of the last decade has shaken transatlantic economic relations as profoundly and sustainably as the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act in 2018

We were never partners – we were always just useful vassals of a global power architecture

Who pulls the strings? Actors, networks, and ideologies behind US technological power

To answer the question of who is behind American technological hegemony, one must begin with an uncomfortable truth: it is not a secret circle, not a hidden conspiracy. The players operate publicly, publishing manifestos, founding think tanks, and buying political influence—with an openness that is almost astonishing in its shamelessness. The network shaping the digital world order according to American interests consists of a small, tightly knit elite from Silicon Valley, ideological thought circles, government intelligence agencies, and politically well-connected technology companies.

At the top of this power structure are a handful of individuals whose influence extends far beyond their corporate balance sheets. Peter Thiel, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1967 and today one of the most influential political thinkers of the American right, is arguably the paradigmatic figure of this new techno-oligarchy. As co-founder of PayPal, the first outside investor in Facebook, and founder of the data analytics company Palantir, he has built an empire that makes no distinction between business and state power—he is both simultaneously. Palantir, named after the all-seeing stone spheres from Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," received its first contracts in 2005 from the CIA, which invested two million dollars in the then-young company. Since then, government contracts worth up to ten billion dollars have followed—from both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Thiel is more than just an entrepreneur, however. In a 2009 essay for the libertarian Cato Institute, he formulated a statement that encapsulates his worldview: "Freedom and democracy are no longer compatible." This anti-democratic stance connects him to the blogger and neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, who, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, developed the ideological blueprint for a technocratic rule of efficiency—a state run like a startup, free from elections, constitutions, and democratic oversight. Yarvin is considered a key figure for high-ranking politicians in the Trump administration; Vice President JD Vance, a former employee of Thiel and mentored by him, carries these ideas directly into the centers of power.

Elon Musk completes this picture. His leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Trump is not merely austerity, but the implementation of Yarvin's RAGE program—Retire All Government Employees—into reality. What began as provocative theory in the libertarian internet of the 2000s became declared state policy in the second Trump administration. The concentration of economic and political power in the same hands has the character that outgoing President Joe Biden, in his farewell address, described as the "tech-industry complex"—a warning that, in light of subsequent developments, takes on a prophetic quality.

The ideological roots of this movement run deeper than the current administration. The philosopher Ayn Rand, whose works have been required reading in Silicon Valley for decades, portrayed the entrepreneur as a heroic individual whose freedom is curtailed by the regulatory state. In this worldview, regulation is not about protecting the common good, but rather a hostile restriction of progress. That Vice President Vance himself declared at a conference that the aim was to reconcile the interests of the tech industry with those of the United States is not rhetorical exaggeration—it is policy. Silicon Valley, once a bastion of California's counterculture and optimism about progress, is now the ideological backbone of an authoritarian, anti-democratic vision of the state.

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From Pearl Harbor to digital control: How data access changed the world

The story of the CLOUD Act doesn't begin in 2018. It begins on September 11, 2001—and even earlier, in 1986. That year's Stored Communications Act (SCA) was the first US law to regulate government access to electronically stored communications. It was a world before the cloud, before the mobile internet, before global connectivity. Lawmakers thought in terms of national infrastructures; the question of whether US law could apply to data in an Irish data center was far outside their conceptual horizon.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 changed everything. The Patriot Act, passed in an atmosphere of national trauma and political urgency, dramatically expanded government powers. Technology companies became extensions of the surveillance state, and for the first time, the lines between economic infrastructure and national security were systematically blurred. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), particularly Section 702, has since allowed US intelligence agencies to access the communications of non-US citizens abroad—without a warrant, without notification, and without effective legal recourse for those affected.

The decisive turning point before the CLOUD Act was a 2013 drug-related search warrant. US federal authorities suspected that a drug trafficking operation was being coordinated through a Microsoft email account. They obtained a Security Compliance Agreement (SCA) warrant and ordered Microsoft to hand over all data from that account. Microsoft determined that the email content in question was stored exclusively in its data center in Dublin, Ireland. The company refused to release the Irish data, arguing that the SCA had no extraterritorial application. What followed was a years-long legal battle through all levels of the court system—up to the Supreme Court.

The Microsoft case was not an isolated oddity, but symptomatic of a structural tension: The US government insisted that it didn't matter where data was physically stored, as long as a US company controlled it. Microsoft and other technology companies argued that such an interpretation would undermine the trust of international customers—and thus their business model. It was therefore not a fight for European data sovereignty, but a conflict of economic interests. Congress had already attempted to develop legislative solutions with the LEADS Act of 2015 and the ICPA of 2017, but each time failed due to political resistance.

On March 23, 2018, President Trump signed the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act—the CLOUD Act—as part of a massive budget bill, into which it had been inserted as an annex. The law resolved the Microsoft case legally by simply eliminating the problem: It now explicitly mandates that U.S. providers must hand over data, regardless of whether that data is stored within or outside the United States. The Supreme Court decision was rendered moot, as the Justice Department could now obtain a new CLOUD Act-compliant search warrant. The case was dismissed. The precedent had been set.

The significance of this date should not be underestimated. 2018 is not a beginning, but a culmination point. It is the moment when a decades-long expansion strategy of American legal and data power received legal codification. The infrastructure for this – the dominance of global networks by US corporations, the close entanglement of these corporations with intelligence agencies, the aggressive patenting of digital infrastructure – had long been in place. In 2018, it simply received a new, clearer legal framework.

The CLOUD Act as a hegemonic legal act: When laws override boundaries

The CLOUD Act is a legal masterpiece of extraterritorial power projection. It applies not only to US companies headquartered in the US, but to all electronic communications services that operate in the US or have a legal presence there. The crucial question, therefore, is not the physical location of data storage, but rather the control over it by the company in question. A data center in the heart of Frankfurt, operated by Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, offers no legal protection against US government access, because the parent company is located in the US and is subject to its authority there.

A report by the University of Cologne, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and made publicly available in December 2025, confirms this assessment with academic precision. In particular, the Security Compliance Act (SCA) in its expanded version through the CLOUD Act, as well as FISA Section 702, allow US authorities to compel cloud providers to disclose data – even if this data is stored outside the US. The report notes that not only US subsidiaries, but potentially also purely European companies can be affected, provided they maintain relevant business connections in the US. The reach of US law, therefore, does not de facto end at the borders of the US – it follows capital.

The secrecy mechanism is particularly problematic. If US authorities access data under the CLOUD Act, neither the individuals concerned nor European supervisory authorities need to be informed. Notification of the affected parties is only permitted with the approval of the US authorities. European citizens who have entrusted their data to a US cloud provider thus live in a state of constant legal uncertainty: they do not know whether their data has already been accessed and have no effective legal remedy to find out or prevent this.

Microsoft's chief legal officer in France, Anton Carniaux, articulated this legal reality with alarming candor in a hearing before the French Senate: Microsoft cannot guarantee that data from European authorities will not be transferred to the US government. Even though no such cases have occurred to date, Microsoft is obligated to cooperate with formally correct requests for information from US authorities. This assessment directly contradicts what Microsoft's marketing in Europe promotes under the term "EU data boundary." While a processing limit may exist technically, legal access remains possible.

The GDPR, the European data protection law, explicitly prohibits the transfer of personal data to third countries under the conditions stipulated in the CLOUD Act. Article 48 of the GDPR stipulates that data transfers to third countries are only permitted if mutual legal assistance agreements are in place. European companies and authorities using US cloud services thus find themselves in a systematic legal conflict: either they cooperate with US authorities under the CLOUD Act and violate European law – or they refuse to cooperate and risk US legal consequences. The European Data Protection Supervisor already considered the CLOUD Act to be potentially in conflict with the GDPR in 2018. Little has changed since then.

From IBM to ChatGPT: The three waves of digital conquest

To understand the current situation, it is worth looking back at the structure of American technological power, which has unfolded in three clearly recognizable waves – each more complete, each more deeply integrated into European infrastructure than the previous one.

The first wave was the era of enterprise hardware and software. From the 1970s to the 1990s, IBM, Microsoft, and later Oracle dominated enterprise IT. IBM not only supplied computers and mainframes but also architectural decisions that created dependencies lasting for decades. Microsoft established a globally standardized office environment with Windows and Office products, the lock-in effects of which persist to this day. This wave was essentially product-centric: companies bought software and hardware, which they then operated themselves. The dependency was real, but at least data storage was local.

The second wave was the cloud revolution of the 2000s and 2010s. Amazon Web Services, founded in 2006 as an internal IT infrastructure, became the global infrastructure of the internet – for startups, corporations, and government agencies alike. Today, Amazon (29%), Microsoft (20%), and Google (13%) together control approximately 62 percent of the global cloud market. For Europe, this represents a structural capitulation: European companies and government agencies no longer operate their own IT infrastructure; they lease it from US corporations. As a result, data, computing power, and ultimately, the foundations for business decisions are migrating to the jurisdiction of US law.

The third wave, which is only just beginning, is the AI ​​wave – and it is potentially the most consequential of all. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon control not only the cloud infrastructure on which AI models are trained, but also the data from which these models learn. OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested billions, and Google DeepMind effectively define which AI standards apply globally, which languages ​​and cultural horizons these systems understand, and which they do not. According to industry estimates, Europe holds only around four percent of the world's AI computing capacity, while approximately 70 percent is concentrated in the US. The planned "Stargate" initiative by Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI is expected to invest $500 billion in expanding US AI infrastructure over the next four years. By comparison, Europe's total planned investment in four "AI gigafactories" amounts to $20 billion.

These three waves follow an internal logic: Each leverages the infrastructure and dependencies built in the previous wave to further entrench the next. Those already using Microsoft software will naturally switch to Microsoft Azure; those using Microsoft Azure will deploy Microsoft Copilot. It's not a conspiracy—it's the normal logic of network effects, switching costs, and strategic lock-ins, which, however, is transformed into a systemic security problem for non-US actors by government legislation like the CLOUD Act.

The National Security Strategy as a declaration: Dependence as state policy

For a long time, it could be argued that American technological power was a byproduct of market superiority, not a deliberate strategy. This argument lost its foundation in 2025. The US National Security Strategy 2025, for the first time in an official government document, enshrines the goal of establishing monopolies for American technologies in non-American markets and deepening strategic dependencies. This is not interpretation, not speculation—it is declared state policy of a government that has elevated the interests of the tech sector to a national priority.

The consequences of this policy are already being felt. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued arrest warrants against Israeli government officials, the Trump administration invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose sanctions on the ICC. Because Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are considered "US persons" under the law, these companies were effectively forced to block the ICC's access to its own mailboxes. An international judicial authority on European soil was locked out of its own digital infrastructure—not by a military operation, but by a click in Seattle or Redmond. A similar pattern emerged with the Amsterdam Trade Bank, where Microsoft refused to provide court-appointed liquidators with a copy of its bank data, citing US sanctions laws.

The Economist Bert Hubert, a Dutch network expert, sums up the situation succinctly: Europe is in a state of "near-total" digital dependency, and concerns about the "former ally" are no longer theoretical. What he means is the alarming reality that a foreign power can decide at any time to lock European institutions out of their own digital tools—without war, without sanctions in the traditional sense, simply by applying American law to American companies that happen to provide all of Europe's digital infrastructure.

Europe's digital services deficit with the US was estimated at around €148 billion in 2024, according to the Xpert analysis network. This represents a massive transfer of capital – European capital flowing to the US for cloud services, software licenses, and data analytics, financing the American technology industry, which in turn leverages its market power to cement Europe's dependence. Bitkom data underscores this vulnerability at the company level: 9 out of 10 European companies are digitally dependent, and 57 percent could survive for a maximum of one year without digital imports.

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The Palantir Paradox: When security agencies become a self-service store for US interests

No company symbolizes the entanglement of Silicon Valley, US state power, and the European security apparatus more clearly than Palantir. The company's core idea originates directly from the state surveillance apparatus: a fraud detection technology used by PayPal was reprogrammed into counterterrorism software after 9/11. The CIA invested two million dollars in 2005 as the initial investor, and since then, Palantir's revenues have been closely linked to the defense budgets and security apparatuses of both democratic and autocratic governments.

The situation is particularly sensitive in Germany. Bavaria, Hesse, and North Rhine-Westphalia are already using Palantir's VeRA software for police investigations. Up to seven Palantir employees, staff of a US company with close ties to the CIA, work, in some cases, directly within German police facilities – with access to both test and production systems. Manuel Atug, spokesperson for the independent working group on critical infrastructures, described this as a "security failure." The idea of ​​private employees of a US company operating within the German police force would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

The SPD parliamentary group's spokesperson on domestic policy, Sebastian Fiedler, called Palantir founder Thiel a "particularly threatening enemy of democracy" and declared that it was unacceptable to financially support such an actor with taxpayer money earmarked for security authorities. Several SPD-governed states point to the possibility that Palantir could transfer data on German citizens to the USA – a concern that, given Palantir's business model, seems anything but far-fetched.

Meanwhile, Palantir has signed a ten-year, ten-billion-dollar contract with the US military and is playing a leading role in the development of the American "Golden Dome" missile defense system. In January 2025, the company raised its revenue forecast for the full year to between $3.74 and $3.76 billion. Analyst Dan Ives expects a valuation of one trillion dollars in three to four years – driven by military and intelligence demand. European taxpayer funds intended for German police authorities are flowing directly into this growth engine.

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NATO as a bargaining chip: When military security becomes a commodity

Trump's NATO threats fit seamlessly into the picture of a power politics that understands alliances not as communities of shared values, but as transactional entities. Barely had Trump begun his second term than he continued the threatening rhetoric he had already established during his first presidency and election campaign. In March 2026, he described NATO to the British Telegraph as a "paper tiger" and suggested that US membership would have to be reconsidered after the end of the Iran-Iraq War. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had seconded this shortly before, stating that after the conflict's conclusion, "the value of NATO and this alliance for our country" would have to be reassessed.

The political analysis of these threats must distinguish between two levels: the legal and the strategic. On the legal level, a unilateral NATO withdrawal by Trump is indeed difficult to implement. At the end of 2023, the US Congress passed a law as part of the National Defense Authorization Act that prohibits the president from withdrawing from the Atlantic alliance without a two-thirds majority in the Senate or a formal congressional resolution. This law was introduced by none other than Marco Rubio together with Democratic Senator Tim Kaine—a historical irony, since Rubio, as Trump's Secretary of State, is now spreading threats of NATO withdrawal that his own law prevents.

At the strategic level, the threat is nonetheless highly effective, as its impact is independent of its feasibility. US expert Josef Braml of the German Council on Foreign Relations precisely describes Trump's behavior: It is not a concrete political roadmap, but rather a deliberately issued strategic threat. Trump is transforming collective security guarantees into negotiable options. Those who do not support American military action—currently in Iran—risk losing the promise of assistance. Security becomes a matter of negotiation, and the price is paid in economic concessions, arms purchases, and—one might add—digital dependence.

European NATO members are already preparing for scenarios that were considered unthinkable just a few years ago. Behind the scenes, contingency plans are being drawn up. Discussions are focused on a transitional agreement that would gradually transfer defense responsibility to the Europeans over a ten-year period. The US Congress has now enshrined in law that the number of US troops stationed in Europe must not fall below 76,000 – but laws can be changed, and political pressure remains palpable.

The historical question underlying these developments is uncomfortable: Was the transatlantic partnership ever what it claimed to be? The sobering answer is: conditionally. After 1945, the US supported Europe out of strategic self-interest – as a glacis against Soviet communism, as a market for American industrial products, as a legitimizing backdrop for a liberal world order that served American interests. The shared values ​​were real, and alliance solidarity had its core – but it was never the primary motivation, rather a useful byproduct of strategic calculations. If these calculations change, if Europe is more important as an ally against China than as an ally against Russia, if digital dependencies become more profitable than security guarantees, then the alliance will be reoriented. Not betrayed, but repurposed.

Digital vassalage: Europe's dependence in figures and facts

The figures paint a clear picture. Approximately 70 percent of the European cloud market is controlled by three US companies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This concentration surpasses the market power in almost every other European sector. A hospital group, a municipal utility company, a federal agency, a defense contractor: all largely utilize the same US cloud infrastructure and are therefore subject to the CLOUD Act, whether they know it or not.

The AI ​​wave is structurally exacerbating this dependency. Europe holds an estimated four percent of global AI computing capacity, while 70 percent is located in the US. The European AI companies considered potential alternatives—Mistral from France, Aleph Alpha from Germany—almost without exception run on Nvidia hardware, whose chips and production capacities, in turn, originate in the US or are controlled via American supply chains. "Without its own chip infrastructure, AI sovereignty is like putting a label on someone else's bottle," as the industry aptly puts it.

The Dutch tax authority has migrated all its documents to the Microsoft cloud – and admitted internally that the country's tax operations are now "vulnerable to sanctions." This is not an isolated case, but rather the norm. European governments are systematically migrating critical public infrastructure to US providers, despite being aware of the legal risks. The reason is a complex interplay of habit, technological convenience, the lack of compelling alternatives, and – to be honest – the failure of European industrial policy to create and scale effective alternatives.

While European data centers will expand their capacity by 22 percent in 2025, this will not be enough to meet demand – and that pales in comparison to US investments. Capacity bottlenecks are particularly acute in traditional locations like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, where power grid restrictions limit growth. CBRE estimates the cost of building colocation space in Europe at twelve million euros per megawatt; total European industrial expansion this year exceeds 100 billion euros – but the US Stargate initiative plans for 500 billion euros in four years.

The resistance: From Gaia-X to the computer scientists' manifesto

Resistance to digital dependency is gaining momentum, even if it doesn't yet fully address the scale of the problem. The European Union, with its Digital Markets Act (DMA), has classified the largest platforms as "gatekeepers" and imposed strict regulations; Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are required to open up their systems more. The AI ​​Act regulates high-risk AI applications. The Schrems rulings of the European Court of Justice have repeatedly invalidated transatlantic data transfer agreements—Safe Harbor (2015) and Privacy Shield (2020).

Gaia-X, the European federal data infrastructure project launched in 2020, is not an attempt to build a European super-hyperscaler, but rather creates standardization and certification for sovereign data management. Over 180 sectoral data spaces in health, industry, mobility, and energy are currently being implemented. With projects like the German Open Telekom Cloud and Hetzner, competitive European alternatives exist for a wide range of use cases, particularly for regulated industries and government agencies.

The German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik) has called for a five-point plan to enshrine the "European Tech First" principle in public tenders: preferential treatment of European solutions when equally suitable, mandatory sovereignty checks before every procurement, exclusion of companies subject to the CLOUD Act from contracts for critical infrastructure, a ban on framework agreements with US monopolies that cement lock-ins, and massive investments in European digital infrastructure. Germany and France held a summit on digital sovereignty in 2025 and mobilized over twelve billion euros in additional investment; the EU is planning to build four "AI gigafactories" with a total volume of 20 billion dollars.

Public procurement by the EU and its member states amounts to approximately €2.6 trillion annually – roughly 15 percent of the EU's gross domestic product. If these funds were consistently invested in European digital infrastructure, the markets needed for European cloud and AI companies to scale would be created. Japan, South Korea, and China have demonstrated that state-backed national champions can achieve global competitiveness through targeted procurement policies. Europe has the tools – what's lacking is the political will to use them effectively.

The failure of naivety: What the transatlantic partnership really was

Perhaps the most bitter realization at the end of this analysis is not technical, legal, or economic – it is political and psychological. For decades, Europe imagined a partnership that never existed in that form. The US did not protect Europe out of friendship, not solely out of shared values, not out of love for liberal democracy. They did so out of self-interest – and when that interest changes, so does the partnership.

This does not mean that this partnership was worthless. It brought Europe peace, prosperity, and protection. But it does mean that European foreign policy was based on a systematic error: the assumption that a power-political alliance offers the same reliability as a community founded on values ​​and legal obligations. EU enlargement, the common constitution, the further development of European law – all these are attempts to build a community of law from a continent of nation-states. In the areas of security policy and digital technology, Europe has done the opposite: it has become complacent in a dependency that it has never critically examined.

The CLOUD Act, Palantir in German police stations, Trump's NATO threats, the AI ​​dominance of American tech companies – all these are facets of the same fundamental problem: Europe has ceded its strategic autonomy in the crucial areas of the 21st century – data, infrastructure, security technology – to a power that pursues its own interests. This is not a crime of the USA. It is a failure of Europe.

The question is not whether the US was ever a "true partner." It is whether Europe is willing and able to break free from the logic of dependency and fight for a digital sovereignty worthy of the name. The technological capabilities exist. The economic foundation exists. The legal framework exists, albeit incomplete. What remains is a strategic decision: to build Europe not as an extension of American tech companies, but as an independent digital power—with its own infrastructure, its own legal system, and the courage to engage with American partners on equal terms, not on its knees.

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