We continue to adapt our sovereignty approach—innovating to meet customer needs and regulatory requirements within our Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud. We are announcing a new wave of capabilities, building upon our digital sovereignty controls, to deliver advanced AI and scale, strengthened by our ecosystem of specialized in-country partner experts.

Across Europe and around the world, organizations today face a complex mix of regulatory mandates, heightened expectations for resilience, and relentless technological advancement. Sovereignty has become a core requirement for governments, public institutions, and enterprises seeking to harness the full power of the cloud while retaining control over their data and operations.

In June 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a broad range of solutions to help meet these needs with the Microsoft Sovereign Cloud. We continue to adapt our sovereignty approach—innovating to meet customer needs and regulatory requirements within our **Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud. Today, we are announcing a new wave of capabilities, building upon our digital sovereignty controls, to deliver advanced AI and scale, strengthened by our ecosystem of specialized in-country partner experts. **With this announcement, expanded features and services include:

• End-to-end AI data-processing in Europe as part of EU (European Union) Data Boundary.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot expands in-country processing for Copilot Interactions to 15 countries. Learn more about this announcement in the Microsoft 365 blog.
• Sovereign Landing Zones service expansion and disconnected operations for Microsoft Azure Local.
• Microsoft 365 Local general availability.
• Increased maximum scale of Azure Local, support for external SAN storage, and support for the latest NVIDIA GPUs.
• Availability of our partner Digital Sovereignty specialization.

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud continuous innovation

Our latest offerings include new digital sovereignty capabilities across AI, security, and productivity, as well as a suite of upcoming features that will further address our customers’ sovereign cloud needs.

We recognize the need for continuous innovation and have already begun implementing many commitments. As of this month, we have already:

• Established a European board of directors, composed of European nationals, exclusively overseeing all datacenter operations in compliance with European law, thereby putting Europe’s cloud infrastructure into the hands of Europeans.
• Increased European datacenter capacity with recent launches in Austria and an upcoming launch in Belgium this month.
• Embedded our digital resiliency commitments into all relevant government contracts.
• Expanded open‑source investment through funding secure open-source software (OSS) projects and collaborations as well as publishing AI Access Principles that widen safe, responsible access to advanced AI, helping European developers, startups, and enterprises compete more effectively across the region.
• Advanced our European Security Program by providing AI-powered intelligence and cybersecurity capacity building initiatives to strengthen Europe’s digital resilience against threat actors.

New Sovereign Public Cloud and AI capabilities

From the moment organizations begin designing their environments for sovereignty, they need end-to-end capabilities that help them embed compliance and control from the start.

EU Data Boundary includes AI data processing residency

We are** delivering on our **end-to-end AI data processing commitments, where data processed by AI services for EU customers remains within the European Union Data Boundary, except as otherwise directed by the customer.

This means all customer data, whether at rest or in transit, will be stored and processed exclusively in the EU. Our approach includes implementing rigorous controls and transparency measures that comply with EU customer requirements.

Expanding Microsoft 365 Copilot in-country data processing to 15 countries

Building upon decades of investment in global infrastructure and industry-leading data residency capabilities, Microsoft will now offer in-country data processing for customers’ Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions in 15 countries around the world.

By the end of 2025, Microsoft will offer customers in four countries—Australia, India, Japan and the United Kingdom—the option to have Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions processed in-country. In 2026, we’ll expand the availability of in-country data processing for Microsoft 365 Copilot to customers in eleven more countries including Canada, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

New Sovereign Landing Zone (SLZ) foundation

We are also introducing our refreshed Sovereign Landing Zone (SLZ), built on the market-proven landing zone foundation of Azure Landing Zone (ALZ).

The Sovereign Landing Zone is the recommended platform landing zone for customers wanting to implement sovereign controls in the Azure public cloud as part of the Sovereign Public Cloud.

The refresh of the Sovereign Landing Zone includes:

• Updated Management Group hierarchy and supporting Azure Policy definitions, initiatives, and assignments to help implement the Sovereign Public Cloud controls (Level 1, 2, and 3).
• Guidance on deployment placement of Azure Key Vault Managed HSM, if required as part of Level 2 Sovereign controls.
• Deployment simplified via the Azure landing zone accelerator and the Azure landing zone library. See Sovereign Landing Zone (SLZ) implementation options for further details.

Over the next few months, the Azure Policy definitions, initiatives, and assignments that come built-in to the Sovereign Landing Zone will continue to expand to help our customers achieve sovereign controls in the sovereign public cloud out-of-the-box faster.

By adopting Sovereign Landing Zones, customers can gain a prescriptive architecture that accelerates compliance with regional sovereignty requirements while reducing complexity in policy management. This approach also helps organizations confidently scale workloads across Azure regions without compromising on regulatory alignment or operational consistency.

New Sovereign Private Cloud and AI capabilities

As organizations deepen their commitment to sovereignty, the ability to combine regulatory compliance with innovation becomes especially important. This next wave of enhancements helps bring together advanced AI capabilities and scalable infrastructure designed for both public and private environments.

Supporting thousands of AI models on Azure Local with NVIDIA RTX GPUs

As we advance our Sovereign Private Cloud capabilities with Azure Local, we are introducing a new Azure offering with the latest NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell** **Server Edition GPU purpose-built for high performance AI workloads in sovereign environments.

Designed to run over 1,000 models such as GPT OSS, DeepSeek-V3, Mistral NeMo, and Llama 4 Maverick, this GPU enables organizations to accelerate their AI initiatives directly within a sovereign private cloud environment. Customers gain the flexibility to experiment, innovate, and deploy advanced AI solutions with enhanced performance. This means organizations can pursue new AI-powered opportunities while helping ensure data protection and compliance.

In addition, customers can gain access to thousands of prebuilt and open-source AI models, ready to deploy for a wide range of scenarios—from generative AI and advanced analytics to real-time decision making. This combination empowers customers to experiment, innovate, and operationalize cutting edge AI solutions, while keeping governance front and center.

Increasing Azure Local scale to hundreds of servers

Azure Local has supported single clusters of up to 16 physical servers. With our latest updates, Azure Local can support hundreds of servers, opening new possibilities for organizations with large-scale or growing sovereign private cloud demands. This enhancement means customers can support bigger, more complex workloads, scale their infrastructure with ease, and respond to evolving business needs all while aligning with the security and sovereignty required by European and global regulations.

SAN support on Azure Local

A key highlight of expanding the scale of our Sovereign Private Cloud is the introduction of Storage Area Network (SAN) support on Azure Local. With this update, customers can now securely connect their existing on-premises storage solutions from industry leaders to Azure Local. This integration empowers organizations to leverage their trusted storage investments while benefiting from cloud-native services, helping ensure data remains within their desired jurisdiction. European enterprises, in particular, gain flexibility in meeting local data residency requirements without compromising on performance or control.

Microsoft 365 Local: General availability of key workloads

Another milestone is the general availability of Microsoft 365 Local, helping bring core productivity workloads—Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Skype for Business Server natively to Azure Local. Starting in December, customers can deploy these productivity workloads on Azure Local in a connected mode, with a disconnected option for complete isolation coming early 2026. This approach combines familiar collaboration tools with Azure Local’s unified management and consistent Azure services and APIs, enabling organizations to maintain full operational control while aligning with stringent compliance and data residency requirements.

Disconnected operations: General availability

Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud extends sovereignty principles into fully dedicated environments for organizations with strict compliance and control requirements, enabled by Azure Local. Azure Local enables government agencies, multinational enterprises, and regulated entities to maintain local control while still benefiting from the scale and innovation of Microsoft’s global cloud platform.

As part of Azure Local, we are introducing the upcoming general availability of disconnected operations, including the ability to manage multiple Azure Local clusters from the same local control plane. Available in early 2026, this capability allows customers to operate private cloud environments with a completely on-premises control plane, enabling organizations to operate securely and independently within their own dedicated environments. With disconnected operations, customers can retain business continuity and operational resilience, even in highly regulated or edge scenarios.

New partner Digital Sovereignty specialization now available

We’re excited to officially launch the Digital Sovereignty specialization as part of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. This new specialization empowers partners to demonstrate deep expertise in delivering secure, compliant, and sovereign cloud solutions across Azure and Microsoft 365 platforms. By earning this designation, partners signal their ability to meet stringent data residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements—helping customers maintain control over their applications and data while driving innovation. The specialization includes rigorous audit criteria and provides benefits such as enhanced discoverability, specialized badging, and priority access to sovereign cloud opportunities.

Looking ahead: Advancing sovereignty through greater controls

The Microsoft Sovereign Cloud roadmap will provide additional capabilities designed to address evolving customer needs including:

Sovereign Public Cloud

• Data Guardian: This upcoming capability helps provide transparency into operational sovereignty controls in our European public cloud environments. All remote access by Microsoft engineers to the systems that store and process your data in Europe will be routed to the EU, where an EU-based operator can monitor and, if necessary, halt these activities. All remote access by Microsoft engineers will be recorded in a tamper-evident log.

Sovereign Private Cloud

• Enhanced change controls: We will introduce a set of configurable policies and approval workflows that will empower organizations with explicit oversight of any changes propagating from the cloud to the edge, strengthening governance and compliance.
• Site-to-site disaster recovery: Azure Site Recovery in Azure Local will help with business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages.
• Move from hybrid to fully disconnected: Azure Local will enable customers to transition workloads from hybrid to fully disconnected operations, providing them with flexibility for business continuity.

National Partner Clouds

National Partner Clouds are a core part of the Microsoft Sovereign Cloud strategy. They provide independently operated cloud environments that deliver Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 capabilities under local ownership and control.

• Delos Cloud is designed to meet German government’s BSI cloud platform requirements.
• Bleu is designed to meet the French government’s (ANSSI) SecNumCloud requirements.

For many public sector organizations, ERP is a critical workload that requires modernization to cloud environments. SAP is planning to deploy its RISE with SAP offering on Microsoft Azure for both Bleu and Delos Cloud customers, in addition to support of RISE with SAP for customers using Microsoft Azure public cloud deployments.

Learn more about Microsoft’s sovereign solutions

Microsoft delivers unmatched sovereign solutions, offering a flexible public cloud environment, a private cloud that scales to your business needs, and national partner clouds designed to meet specific compliance requirements. Our commitment to continuous investment and innovation helps our customers meet sovereignty without compromise.

Discover what’s next in cloud innovation this November at Microsoft Ignite. Learn more and register today.