SUSE's sovereignty pitch meets an inconvenient $6 billion question
- Reference: 1777370407
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/04/28/sovereignty_its_all_about_the/
- Source link:
In March, Swedish private equity biz EQT – which spun out SUSE from US group Micro Focus in 2018 for [1]$2.5 billion – reportedly commissioned Arma Partners to examine the open source provider's options. This is still at the early stages, but any sale to a US buyer would put a dent in SUSE's European digital sovereignty credentials.
Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age [2]READ MORE
The Register asked SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen at SUSECON what sovereignty means given the potential acquisition.
"SUSE, in its nature, is a European company. We are registered in Europe, everything is in Europe. If we get acquired by another shareholder, even if the shareholder would be American, we are still a European company with shareholders in America. But we are operating according to European laws. That's all I can say about it other than it's all speculation."
Digital sovereignty is not a new notion but since the Trump administration returned to power in January last year, generating trade and geopolitical turbulence with its allies, European enterprises have accelerated efforts to reduce their dependence on US big tech.
[3]
The wrinkle for SUSE is that a sale to US owners would complicate its narrative considerably: American corporations can be compelled under the US CLOUD Act to hand over customer data held on servers located anywhere in the world.
[4]
[5]
SUSE's Global Head of Sovereign Solutions, Andreas Prins - formerly CEO of StackState, which [6]SUSE acquired in 2024 - acknowledged the nuance. "We're a European company, but our customers are global customers, and that's super important."
He sees a meaningful difference in how US and European customers frame the problem. American customers, he says, focus on data security: who owns it, who has access, who controls the keys. Europeans, by contrast, are preoccupied with the vendor relationship itself - the contract, the jurisdiction, the question of who can ultimately reach in.
[7]
SUSE hammered home its Europeanness repeatedly throughout the event. The Reg lost count of how many times various company reps made the point. The company is surfing a genuine wave of interest in digital and AI sovereignty, even as countries and regions diverge on what sovereignty actually means in practice.
As regulations pile up, SUSE's CTO Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo offered a weary quip in a briefing: "I'd rather have less!"
The scale of interest is real. In a [8]survey of 309 IT leaders from countries including the US and Japan, SUSE found that 98 percent were prioritizing digital sovereignty, with more than half taking action, be that developing a strategy or having one in place.
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Prins is clear that a wholesale exodus from the hyperscalers is highly unlikely. "We've seen that 70 percent of the respondents across the globe believe that the hyperscaler is part of the solution."
What SUSE does see is a trend towards local workloads - though Prins is quick to add that this remains a small slice of what already runs in the cloud.
[10]Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami
[11]Switzerland built a secure alternative to BGP. The rest of the world hasn't noticed yet
[12]Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech
[13]Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle
[14]Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
"We're not saying that we will see an exodus of the hyperscaler in any region, and therefore hyperscalers die, right? I don't believe that, not at all," said Prins.
"What is much more interesting is the trend: how do people actually, from a strategic perspective, make a much more evaluated risk on how they ... move away? So the trend we see is that they start to rank ... their applications from a business criticality perspective, and say, hey, the most mission critical ones, let's reassess where they need to be operated."
Chip off the old block
SUSE is a software company, but hardware looms over any serious sovereignty conversation. Europe is relatively well-positioned in software; a truly sovereign hardware stack remains a distant prospect.
"Hardware is slightly different," acknowledged Prins, "There's a whole movement going on with regards to chip designs, and the more open, you could argue, the better it is."
His view is that software carries the greater sovereignty risk. "If it's an open source software and open architecture that runs there, technically speaking, everyone can pick it up until the chip physically breaks down and doesn't do the job.
"What SUSE does is we try to certify on as much standards as possible. And if you take a look at datacenter providers, they will be stupid if they don't have a variety of technologies in the rack, like the dual-vendor strategy we see happening in the software space. Yeah, if I [were to] host a datacenter, I [would] want to do similar from a hardware perspective." ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/02/linux_makes_suse_sold_for_a_cool_2535bn/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/29/europes_cloud_challenge_building_an/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2afDZpVIHIJF6HoqmcilwmgAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44afDZpVIHIJF6HoqmcilwmgAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33afDZpVIHIJF6HoqmcilwmgAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.suse.com/news/suse-acquires-stackstate/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44afDZpVIHIJF6HoqmcilwmgAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.suse.com/navigating-digital-resilience-2026/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33afDZpVIHIJF6HoqmcilwmgAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/24/trump_threatens_big_tariff_on/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/switzerland_bgp_alternative/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/22/europe_gets_serious_about_cutting/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/microsoft_asks_uk_parliament_to_correct_record/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_cloud/
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Trump
Putin is very happy about it.
Re: Trump
The long term repercussions are likely to last long after DJT has gone.
Re: Trump
There is no doubt that he's a cancer in the world. But I think there are positives to what he's done as well, in so much that the world has woken up to the dangers of blind trust in America and that the alternatives available to everyone outside of the country are more viable now than any point in the past.
So for that, Senior Tango Twat, you've done bigly good.
What effect on the future share price ?
If it were to become subject to the cloud act - would that make it less attractive to those in Europe who are worried about digital sovereignty ?
Re: What effect on the future share price ?
Yes. It will be just like any other tech offer, so there will be absolutely no push to move away from the current (MS, AWS, Google) to Suse.
Pan-nationalisation
Never thought I'd say this, but SUSE need to get bought by the EU to keep themselves out of US hands.
Then hopefully the EU can have a standard open source operating system, they can mandate member states use.
Re: Pan-nationalisation
You mean by the EU or by an EU-based company?
I would see the benefits of something like an EU-curated distro, just like the French are doing with their police distro. I don't know why governmental distros are not a thing. And it wouldn't exclude private companies from providing the support, etc At the end of the day, no matter if they use Windows even for their toasters, but the servers and cloud infra will have to run Linux anyway, usually RHEL.
Re: Pan-nationalisation
"I don't know why governmental distros are not a thing."
Because most of the work required to run a distro isn't different for a government, so why should they, and if they change it too much, it's not useful for anyone else so they end up with the maintenance burden alone. What you'd end up with is either something almost the same as another distro or something so different that it gets out of date. The more users a distro has, the more people the cost of maintenance is spread between, and there's usually nothing secret in them so that sharing works fine between governments, businesses, individuals, and other organizations.
FOSS in general, and Linux distros in particular are collaborartive efforts. Much of the foundational blocks are VERY STRONGLY tied to entities and people in the USoA.
Having said that, Suse is in a strrong position compared to other entities.
First because they are the clear #2 in many important categories. (i.e. they have critical mass)
And second, because they make their own stack from the basic building blocks, unlike other companies that depend on other "base distros" based in the USoA.
For example, anything "European" based on RHEL/Fedora or on Debian (say Ubuntu, Mint or Zorin) suffers from this.
In other tack, too bad Suse scraped their OpenStack offerings a while ago.
Microsoft interoperability and collaboration Covenant
[1]Covenant to Downstream Recipients : “Microsoft, on behalf of itself and its Subsidiaries, hereby covenants not to sue Downstream Recipients of Novell and its Subsidiaries for infringement under Necessary Claims of Microsoft on account of such Downstream Recipients’ use of Moonlight [SuSE) Implementations to the extent originally provided by Novell during the Term and, if applicable, the Extension or Post-Extension Period, but only to the extent such Moonlight Implementations are used to provide Plug-In Functionality. The foregoing covenants shall survive termination of the Agreement, but only as to specific copies of such Moonlight Implementations distributed during the Term, and if applicable, the Extension or Post-Extension Period.”
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/tech-licensing/customer-agreements
Trump
Jesus, that man's an arse. The damage he's done to the world is appalling.