Digital sovereignty loomed large at Nextcloud's annual summit in Munich last week, where Benoît Piédallu, National Project Manager of Shared Digital Services at the French Ministry of Education, injected a dose of reality into the debate. Nextcloud is an open source storage and collaboration suite. France's Ministry of Education started initial work to adopt it in 2018, Piédallu said, with the COVID-19 pandemic turning up the urgency in 2020. In 2021, "we had this little incident with OVH, a little fire, which destroyed all our data," Piédallu noted dryly. The Ministry went all-in and signed contracts with Nextcloud in 2024. The Ministry wants to provide its users with federated storage and account management. At the time of Piédallu's presentation, the Ministry has set up slightly more than 400,000 accounts, and hopes to eventually reach 1.2 million users. Each account could be allocated 100 GB of storage (a potential 120 PB), although Piédallu said the average storage consumption currently sits at around 3 GB per account. So far, 80,000 sync clients have been persistently connected. However, it has not all been plain sailing, despite recent pledges from the French government about shifting away from American tools and reducing France's dependence on non-European technology. Nobody should be able to switch off or shut down our services from the outside Digital sovereignty means different things to different people. Right now, this project does not include desktop applications. The users "use whatever they want on their desktop… Microsoft if they want," Piédallu said. "So we have some problems sometimes, and people are saying that it is not working, and we say, 'Yeah, so you just use different software'…" This sums up the challenge facing proponents of digital sovereignty. Users are accustomed to Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office works best in a Microsoft ecosystem, which is at odds with removing dependencies on non-European technology. Microsoft and the other hyperscalers are hard habits to break, and while services like Nextcloud's are capable of handling storage and file synchronization, users accustomed to Microsoft's more visible applications and services, such as Office, will be trickier to migrate. But migrate they must to realize France's digital sovereignty dream. "Nobody," said Piédallu, "should be able to switch off or shut down our services from the outside. Nobody should be accessing our services from the outside." The Nextcloud Hub 26 spring release, which includes Euro-Office, became generally available last week. The Euro-Office productivity suite may go some way to satisfying desktop refuseniks. The EU wants to increase digital autonomy through the European Technological Sovereignty Package, although analysts have warned this could complicate matters for customers. The French Education Ministry's experience shows that sovereign file storage can work at scale. Persuading users to give up the tools they already know may prove the harder part. ®

Amazon says its datacenters used about 2.5 billion gallons of water last year, but claims that's far less than rival hyperscalers and that it remains on track to become "water positive" by 2030. In a blog post, the digital tat bazaar and cloud computing biz says the 2.5 billion gallon figure covers its entire global datacenter footprint for 2025. It downplayed the number by comparing it to the volume of water Americans - a country of 350 million people - used on lawns and gardens over the same period. Amazon disclosed water usage of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) at its data facilities, and claimed Microsoft used 0.27 L/kWh during 2025, while Meta's consumption stood at 0.19 L/kWh in 2024 and Google was the thirstiest at 1.15 L/kWh during the same year. The Register has asked Microsoft, Meta and Google to comment. The water usage, we're told, is 75 percent of the way to Amazon's goal - announced in 2022 - of being "water positive" by 2030. It means facilities return more water to the environment than they consume, via measures including rainwater capture or other treating waste water for reuse. The figures come amid growing pushback against datacenter construction in the US. A recent Ipsos survey found most Americans don't want facilities built nearby, citing worries over electricity prices, eyesore buildings, and water-hungry operations. This echoes a 2022 report that found Google datacenters were consuming more than a quarter of all the water used in The Dalles, Oregon. Or, if you'd rather not to blame the industry itself, you could go with the line that Chinese operatives are spreading propaganda over social media, a claim that OpenAI and other interested parties are keen to promote. Whatever the cause of the backlash, the underlying numbers are real: datacenter water use has been climbing for years, driven by the sheer growth in facility numbers and by AI servers, which run hotter and demand more cooling than traditional kit. Water consumption at Microsoft's facilities surged 34 percent to 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022, for example, with generative AI blamed. Making matters worse, many datacenters now in the pipeline in the US are slated for areas already experiencing drought, according to analysis by The Guardian newspaper. Amazon says that its facilities use "free air cooling" about 90 percent of the time, pulling in outside air and flowing it past servers to absorb the heat, with no water involved - though it does resort to evaporative cooling during the hottest weather. But as The Register outlined last year, kicking the water habit completely will be nearly impossible, regardless of what claims the operators may make. ®