EU Cloud Provider News Roundup: January & February 2026

Here’s what happened across European cloud providers and the big three hyperscalers in the first weeks of 2026. We monitor blogs, changelogs, and RSS feeds from all 29 providers in our comparison tool so you don’t have to.

Key Takeaways

EU sovereignty is the dominant theme. Civo’s “sovereignty washing” post, Exoscale’s data sovereignty guide, OVHcloud’s on-prem offering, Thalassa’s Dutch independence pitch, and STACKIT’s AI model serving all show European providers aggressively positioning around sovereignty. It’s no longer a niche concern: it’s the central sales argument.

Managed databases are everywhere. Scaleway pushed MongoDB, Thalassa launched Postgres DBaaS, STACKIT shipped Dremio, and Leafcloud announced managed DBs on their roadmap. The managed database land grab is well underway among EU providers.

AI agent hosting is the new battleground. Scaleway, netcup, and Hostinger all published OpenClaw guides within weeks of each other. Self-hosted AI agents on European infrastructure is clearly a trend multiple providers are chasing.

Supply chain security is table stakes. OVHcloud’s MPR guide covering SBOMs, vulnerability scanning, and image signing reflects that container supply chain security is no longer optional.

STACKIT and Civo are the ones to watch. STACKIT shipped seven product updates in six weeks. Civo published ten posts and launched Konstruct. Both are investing heavily in differentiated offerings.

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Hetzner

Several API and platform changes shipped this period.

user_data for server rebuilds (Jan 16): You can now pass cloud-init user_data when rebuilding a server, not just during creation. Small but useful for automation workflows.

Storage Box subaccount names (Jan 15): Subaccounts now support a name property. Existing accounts were auto-migrated to use their username.

Deprecation: deleting assigned IPs (Jan 29): You can no longer delete Primary IPs or Floating IPs while they’re still assigned. After May 1, 2026, the API returns an error. Update your Terraform Provider to v1.60.0+ if you haven’t already.

Fedora 41 removed (Feb 5): The Fedora 41 image is no longer available for new server provisioning.

Certificate restrictions (Feb 11): Private keys capped at 5 KB, certificate chains limited to 5 certs and 30 KB total. Existing certificates are unaffected.

OVHcloud

Focus on security and enterprise positioning this period.

Secure Software Supply Chain with Managed Private Registry (Feb 13): New guidance on using their MPR for SBOM generation with Trivy, vulnerability scanning with Docker Scout and Grype, and image signing with Cosign or Notation. Practical supply chain security for container workflows.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 (Feb 12): OVHcloud now supports VCF 9.0 as-a-Service starting at EUR 299/month. This is their answer to Broadcom’s licensing shake-up, offering both shared and dedicated infrastructure.

On-Prem Cloud Platform (Feb 11): New OPCP product that brings OVHcloud capabilities into your own facilities. Targeting organizations that need cloud agility but can’t move data off-premises.

Scaleway

Leaning into managed services and AI agents this period.

Managed MongoDB (Feb 3): Promoted their managed MongoDB with zero-downtime migration via Mongosync, GDPR compliance through EU-only infra, and automated scaling. A solid offering, though pricing details remain buried.

Mac mini M4 + AI Agents (Feb 9): Mac mini M4 instances as sandboxed environments for AI agents. Interesting hardware choice, though it’s unclear if the M4 pricing will compete with GPU instances for inference workloads.

What Is DBaaS? (Jan 23) and What is a Virtual Machine? (Jan 19): SEO content. Fine for discoverability, not much signal for existing users.

STACKIT

The Schwarz Group cloud had a busy start to 2026, with a clear AI focus.

Application Load Balancer GA (Jan 26): Their ALB API moved from preview to production. Terraform provider and portal UI dashboard coming in March.

File Storage launched (Jan 14 beta, Feb 3 stable): Managed NFS service with metro-zone synchronous replication across two AZs, system-wide encryption, and snapshot support.

AI Model Serving: Qwen3-VL-235B (Jan 19): Advanced vision-language model added to their shared LLM portfolio for complex reasoning tasks.

AI Model Serving: Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B (Feb 5): Multimodal embedding model supporting 30+ languages, 32K token context, useful for cross-modal retrieval.

Dremio Data Lakehouse (Feb 11): New managed data lakehouse service in public preview with unified SQL interface across multiple data sources.

Secrets Manager audit logging (Jan 13): Granular secret-level event tracking added to their audit logs.

Clearly betting big on sovereign AI infrastructure. Worth watching if you need EU-only AI workloads.

Civo

One of the most active EU providers this period with 10 blog posts.

Introducing Konstruct (Feb 16): GitOps-powered Internal Developer Platform that can be deployed anywhere. Self-service PaaS with full repo control, fast setup, and no lock-in.

What is sovereignty washing? (Feb 10): Exposes how hyperscalers’ digital sovereignty claims can be more marketing than reality.

The economics of a sovereign cloud (Feb 4): Analysis of the business case for sovereign cloud infrastructure.

An introduction to GPU time-slicing (Jan 23): Technical guide on sharing GPUs across multiple workloads in Kubernetes.

Indian cloud market series (Jan 20-22): Three-part series covering India’s cloud landscape, AI impact, and cloud sovereignty vs. innovation.

Leaning hard into the sovereignty narrative, positioning as the transparent alternative to hyperscaler “sovereignty washing.”

Exoscale

Two relevant pieces published.

Kubernetes Audit Logs for SKS (Jan 7): You can now send Exoscale-managed Kubernetes (SKS) audit logs to webhooks of your choice. Important for compliance and security monitoring.

Sovereign Cloud and Data Sovereignty overview (Jan 5): Comprehensive guide to data sovereignty concepts, benefits, and practical steps for compliant cloud strategies.

Thalassa Cloud

Productive start to 2026 with 5 posts, all directly infrastructure-relevant.

Kubernetes v1.35 available (Jan 31): New Kubernetes releases v1.35.1-0 and v1.34.3-0 with updated container runtime, Cilium, and more.

DBaaS Postgres overview (Feb 2): Managed PostgreSQL with high availability, automated backups, and extensions for analytics workloads. New features added in January 2026.

Deploy DB clusters with tcloud CLI (Feb 4): Walkthrough of deploying PostgreSQL clusters from VPC to database using their CLI tool.

Quick-launch Kubernetes clusters (Jan 23): New feature for preconfigured K8s cluster environments, lowering the barrier to try the platform.

Nederlandse Cloud zonder Compromissen (Jan 10): Positioning as a fully Dutch, independent cloud for teams that need European data control.

netcup

New hardware launched this period.

VPS Generation 12 (Jan 20): New VPS generation now available with launch specials. Hardware refresh across their VPS lineup.

OpenClaw AI agent guides (Jan-Feb): Multiple posts on self-hosting AI agents on VPS infrastructure.

Hostinger

Eight posts covering product updates, engineering, and a notable security disclosure.

Security incident report: unauthorized access (Feb 3): Transparent incident report about suspicious activity from December 2025 involving unauthorized server access. This kind of disclosure is rare at this tier of provider. More should do this. Worth reading for the incident response process alone.

One-click AI agents with OpenClaw (Feb 11): OpenClaw is now a true one-click deployment on Hostinger. The third provider this month to ship OpenClaw integration. The pattern is clear.

66 billion bot requests analysis (Jan 20): Deep analysis of bot traffic trends: AI crawlers rising, SEO tool bots shrinking, search engines holding ground. Genuinely useful data.

LLMs under the hood of Hostinger Horizons (Jan 8): Technical deep-dive into their LLM architecture balancing performance, speed, and cost. Refreshingly honest about the tradeoffs.

2026 product updates hub (Feb 9): WordPress AI management, email builder improvements, and payment options.

Webdock

Platform improvements shipped.

New Control Panel (Feb 16): Major control panel redesign with refreshed UX, integrated AI assistant for troubleshooting, and a new help center.

SystemRescue boot from Rescue Console (Jan 8): New capability to boot servers into SystemRescue for filesystem repairs, bootloader fixes, and raw disk access.

Leafcloud

2026 Roadmap (Jan 26): Announced what’s coming: new GPUs, managed databases, faster infrastructure, and more. Signals a significant expansion of their platform this year.

plusserver

Restructured leadership this period.

New management team (Feb 11): New management structure, focused service portfolio, and clear growth orientation.

New CFO: Raphael Bachle (Jan 8): Strengthened management team for their next growth phase.

Serverspace

Infrastructure-focused content published.

How we ensure 99.9% uptime (Feb 6): Behind-the-scenes look at their infrastructure reliability practices.

Server locality and VPS pricing (Jan): Articles on the performance and legal benefits of local servers, and how VPS hosting costs are determined.

AWS EKS

Containers blog covered HA, observability, and cost optimization.

ARC + Karpenter Integration (Feb 10): New controller that dynamically reconfigures Karpenter node pools when Application Recovery Controller detects AZ issues. Prevents pods from being scheduled into unhealthy zones.

EKS + Amazon Q Business (Feb 3): AI-powered log querying for EKS clusters. Aggregates control plane and data plane logs into S3, then uses Amazon Q for natural language queries across your infrastructure logs.

CNCF Fluid for Deep Learning on EKS (Feb 3): Guide for building elastic high-throughput file systems using Fluid and JuiceFS, achieving 50+ GBps throughput for ML training data loading.

EKS Auto Mode + Graviton + Spot (Jan 23): Practical guide on combining EKS Auto Mode with Graviton processors and Spot instances for cost-optimized Kubernetes workloads.

GCP GKE

Seven release updates shipped, though this was a quiet period for GKE feature-wise.

GKE 1.35 is rolling through Rapid channel, with 1.34.3 as Regular channel default.

Cloud Storage FUSE CSI driver issue (Jan 20): Known bug where streaming writes could cause I/O errors in versions before 1.34.0-gke.2011000. If you’re affected, upgrade or disable streaming writes.

Extended channel expanded to support Kubernetes 1.28, 1.29, and 1.30, which is useful if you’re stuck on older versions in regulated environments.

Weekly security patches via Container-Optimized OS updates continue across all channels. GKE’s release cadence remains the most aggressive of the three hyperscalers, but this period was mostly incremental. Nothing that changes your architecture decisions.

Azure AKS

The AKS team published three posts.

KubeVirt on AKS (Feb 6): Guide for running VMs inside Kubernetes using KubeVirt with nested virtualization. Useful for hybrid workloads that aren’t fully containerized yet.

Autoscaling KAITO Inference with KEDA (Feb 3): KAITO v0.8.0 introduced InferenceSet CRD for autoscaling LLM inference workloads based on metrics like waiting requests. Supports both cron-based and metric-driven scaling.

Navigating Capacity Challenges (Jan 30): Solutions for SkuNotAvailable and AllocationFailed errors using Node Auto Provisioning and mixed VM size node pools.

What We’re Watching in March

• Ingress NGINX end-of-life hits in March. If you haven’t migrated, read our retirement guide. Expect providers to publish migration content.
• STACKIT’s ALB Terraform provider and portal dashboard are promised for March. Will it deliver?
• Hetzner’s Primary IP / Floating IP deletion enforcement goes live May 1. Teams using Terraform should be upgrading now.
• Civo’s Konstruct just launched. We’ll be testing it and reporting back.
• MinIO’s open source edition is dead. The GitHub repo was marked “NO LONGER MAINTAINED” on February 12, pushing users toward the commercial AIStor product. After 18 months of stripping features (admin UI removed, Docker images pulled, tickets locked), this is the final step. Teams self-hosting S3-compatible storage need to evaluate forks like OpenMaxIO or alternatives like SeaweedFS and Garage. EU providers with managed object storage just got a stronger pitch.
• OVHcloud VCF 9.0 adoption in the wild : will Broadcom refugees actually move?

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This is the first edition of our monthly EU Cloud Provider News Roundup. Subscribe or check back monthly for the next edition.

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