Google Cloud customers with resources in India have had to deal with elevated latency for several days – and there’s no end in sight. Per a Google status page, on June 9th “A fire at a third-party data center facility required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment, isolating a non-compute local Point of Presence (POP) in Delhi and reducing available network capacity in the metro area.” That shutdown caused “intermittent periods of elevated latency and possible packet loss” for network traffic headed to Google Cloud from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and surrounding areas. “Customers may experience slightly elevated latency and non-optimal network routing into Google Cloud until the affected facility is fully restored,” Google warned. Google has implemented “traffic mitigations” that it says have improved performance “for some Cloud customers,” and is trying to arrange extra peering capacity. That work is ongoing, with the ads-and-cloud giant promising it is “further augmenting our Delhi backbone capacity” and hopes to have better news on Monday. The web giant is also working to improve regional peering capacity in the city of Chennai, to assist large ISPs in India and hopes that work will be complete on Wednesday, June 17th. Japan’s space truck is back in business Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) last week successfully launched its H3 rocket, a welcome return to form after its previous two missions failed. This success will be doubly sweet for JAXA, because the H3 used for this mission employed a pair of outboard boosters – the first time the agency has used the launcher in this configuration. The rocket launched on June 12th and placed six satellites in orbit. South Korean tech exports boom, not just because of AI South Korea’s Ministry of Science and IT on Sunday announced exports of IT products reached $47.8 billion in May, a new record and a sum 128 percent higher than tech exports in May 2025. Semiconductor exports surged by 162.9 percent year over year, due to the AI boom. Mobile phone exports also grew by 15.9 percent, while a category the Ministry calls “computers and peripherals” saw 259.6 percent year-on-year growth. “Displays rebounded due to increased demand for OLEDs for new mobile phones and strong sales of new laptops,” the Ministry said. “Overall exports of mobile phones increased due to a rise in the average selling price of high-spec finished products and robust demand for high-value components such as camera modules.” South Korea imported over $15.7 billion worth of tech in the month, up 36 percent year-over-year, but still achieved a record trade surplus of over $32 billion. Zoho builds its own servers Indian SaaS giant Zoho has cooked up a custom server called “Nathu La” that it says will reduce the cost of operating its platform. “The design philosophy behind Nathu La is rooted in the Open Compute Project (OCP), emphasizing modularity, thermal efficiency, and ease of maintenance, and enabling Zoho's data centers to significantly reduce total cost of ownership and power consumption,” according to a company statement. The machines run Intel Xeon 6 processors and Chipzilla helped to design them, but Zoho says “all intellectual property [is] owned in India.” Zoho says the servers will also help to lower inferencing costs. The company didn’t say how it calculated its performance numbers. The Reg fancies Zoho has compared its own boxes to whatever machines it currently buys off the shelf, and believes that servers tuned to its own needs will deliver better performance. That’s a conclusion many hyperscalers reached years ago. NTT Data’s new boss Japanese tech giant NTT Data has a new president and CEO: Kazuhiko Nakayama scored the twin roles last week, capping a career with the company that started in 1989 and most recently saw him serve as chief financial officer. Previous CEO and president Yutaka Sasaki will become senior executive vice president. “Over the past three years I have had the honour of working closely with Mr Sasaki and the leadership team on a strategic course that has established NTT DATA among the top five IT services businesses globally,” Nakayama said, according to NTT Data’s announcement of its new leadership. “That experience has reinforced my conviction in the strength of our offering, the quality of our people and the size of the opportunity ahead. As I take on the responsibilities of CEO and lead the growth of the NTT DATA Group going forward, I feel a deep sense of dedication, possibility and excitement." ®

Gartner has warned that the EU's plans to triple datacenter capacity in Europe over the next five to seven years will add complexity for public sector tech buyers. The sweeping plans, which encompass sovereign cloud, AI, microprocessors, and open source, will have ramifications for EU tech supply chains and beyond if they get through the legislative process. In the European Technological Sovereignty Package launched last week, the European Commission sought to strengthen its digital autonomy. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: "We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable, and our services secure. This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests, and making our own choices." The backdrop to the EU's action is widespread concern about European providers only offering around 15 percent of cloud infrastructure in the region, with the dominant American providers subject to US jurisdiction. The risks were spelled out when US sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan led to his Microsoft services being suspended. Microsoft denied responsibility, saying it was the ICC's decision. The Dutch press later reported that the decision was made under duress after Microsoft pointed out that its obligations under the sanctions meant it would have to cut off service to the entire organization unless the ICC removed Khan's access. European concerns over reliance on hyperscalers also stem from the US CLOUD Act of 2018, which allows American authorities to compel US-based tech companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. In June 2025, Microsoft admitted under oath in a French court that it couldn't guarantee digital sovereignty if American authorities demanded access to data held on Microsoft servers on foreign soil. The EU's plan – a set of laws and policies – "creates a transparent, non-discriminatory blueprint for digital autonomy that allows the EU to build resilient, sovereign tech infrastructures at home while providing a trusted, legally sound model for international partnerships and multilateral governance abroad." However, public sector CIOs across Europe are likely to find the Technological Sovereignty Package a challenge to implement. The EU proposes bringing the nebulous concept of "digital sovereignty" to life with an auditable, four-level control system. Union Assurance Levels (UALs), as the political and economic bloc calls it, will be based on where the user organization sits across cumulative measures of control, jurisdiction, data processing, supply chain, and security. "The introduction of UALs will likely cause confusion for providers and buyers, as it adds to an already crowded landscape of existing cloud sovereignty criteria," according to Gartner. UALs are set to become legally enforceable under the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), and for public sector tech leaders they will add to an alphabet soup of existing rules and recommendations. These include the European Cybersecurity Certification Framework's Sovereignty Effectiveness Assurance Levels (SEAL), a non-binding framework for scoring and selection; the German Federal Office for Information Security's (BSI) Cloud Computing Autonomy (C3A) policy, also currently non-binding; and France's SecNumCloud, an ANSSI binding certification scheme for government procurement. The new rules mean government CIOs should think about their cloud-based data workloads, digital infrastructure, and core applications not in terms of physical territories, but as defined by legal jurisdiction, Gartner recommends. EU boost for open source Another big chunk of the EU's escape plan is based on promoting open source software. The new Open Source Strategy aims to scale up open source alternatives in cloud, AI, internet technologies, cybersecurity, and semiconductors. The EU plans to invest in skills, support open source startups, and improve the long-term maintenance and security of Europe's open source digital infrastructure. The strategy also introduces procurement guidelines and best practices to support greater use of open source alternatives to proprietary software in the public sector stack. In a separate paper, Gartner says the EU's approach to open source IT services is a fundamental shift. No longer is open source only about cost and innovation. For the EU, it becomes "a mechanism to ensure transparency, auditability, and independence from external control, increasingly supported by EU-led efforts to fund and sustain critical open source components, including their long-term maintenance and security." As a result, the market needs to respond. "Rather than being selectively adopted, open source components will increasingly underpin core platform layers, particularly in sovereign environments," Gartner said. "This requires a move toward industrialized open source capabilities, including governance, security, long-term support, and integration into enterprise-grade delivery models, in line with emerging EU initiatives to ensure their sustained funding and resilience." The last lever the EU wants to pull to rid itself of US-dominated tech comes in the form of a revamped Chips Act, first created to strengthen Europe's research and innovation capacity in semiconductors. It is not to be confused with the US CHIPS and Science Act, which in 2022 allocated a $52.7 billion federal package to boost the American semiconductor industry and reduce reliance on East Asian vendors. The Chips Act 2.0 includes measures to end Europe's reliance on the rest of the world for advanced chips – below 10 nanometers – by prioritizing facilities in the EU. It promises to cut red tape and simplify state aid applications for building chip factories, thereby accelerating development. The EU also plans to join up support between R&D and manufacturing. Taken together, the Technological Sovereignty Package is the EU's first concrete attempt to implement outwardly focused regulations governing public sector technology procurement, Gartner said. "By leveraging common definitions of digital sovereignty, future public sector procurement will shift from purely open competition toward a 'European preference' model for highly secure workloads. "The legislation's focus on chips, datacenters, cloud, AI, and open source establishes a comprehensive 'stacks' view of digital sovereignty as formal EU policy. This shift will trigger a second wave of governments to heavily prioritize European digital sovereignty, following early leaders like France, Germany, and the Netherlands." Before they are adopted and come into force, the proposals will have to be negotiated by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. In the process, they are bound to provoke the US tech industry, and likely the Trump administration. However, the EU has mostly stood by plans for various legislation under the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, meting out rulings and fines. Provided it does the same with the new sovereignty package, suppliers will have to respond to a complete reshaping of tech buying across Europe's public sector. How this stimulates the supply market might change the calculus for all tech buyers throughout Europe and beyond. ®