Five years ago, investors entering a transaction asked familiar questions: What are the revenues? How is EBITDA developing? What does the competitive landscape look like? Today, a new set of questions has entered the due diligence process. Where is the data stored? Which AI systems are being used? Who has access to sensitive deal information? What regulatory risks arise from the data infrastructure itself?
The Drooms Report 2026: Executing in an Era of Market Complexities, with data provided by PitchBook, examines how digital sovereignty is reshaping European M&A and PE dealmaking.
From regulatory footnote to operational reality
US Big Tech companies currently control 65% of Europe’s cloud services market. The EU has therefore made digital sovereignty a strategic priority: securing European control over data, compute and cloud infrastructure. This agenda is already producing tangible consequences for transactions.
France is replacing Microsoft Azure with European cloud provider Scaleway to host the country’s Health Data Hub. Scaleway itself acquired Saagie in 2025 to position itself as a full-stack sovereign platform. In Italy, Scaleway signed a strategic partnership with S2E to accelerate digitalisation and AI adoption with sovereign solutions. These are strong signals that the market is beginning to reorganise around jurisdiction, infrastructure and data control.
Ireland shows the regulatory tension
Ireland illustrates this complexity clearly. As a gateway to the EU with a large concentration of US hyperscaler operations, the country sits at the centre of tensions between the US CLOUD Act and EU data protection rules. Despite being one of Europe’s smaller M&A markets, Ireland’s average deal sizes are among the most volatile, with average PE and M&A deal sizes reaching nearly €1 billion and €700 million year to date. Some of Ireland’s largest historic M&A deals were driven by non-domestic acquirers. Regulatory compliance around cross-border data flows is therefore becoming a defining challenge for the market.
AI as a sovereignty decision
As the report argues, the integration of AI into dealmaking workflows is itself becoming a sovereignty question. Where is the AI hosted? Who developed it? Is sensitive deal data routed through external public-AI APIs? Deal platforms that run on European infrastructure and develop AI capabilities in-house offer a structurally different risk profile.
As Dr. Astrid Roesener, Partner at CMS Munich, notes in the report, AI-supported due diligence is becoming standard, while cybersecurity and data protection are evolving from compliance topics into key value and risk factors.
What this means for practitioners
Digital sovereignty is no longer just a political headline. It is becoming an operational factor in European transactions. The platforms through which deal-critical information flows must credibly answer questions of jurisdiction, access control and data security. As Alexandre Grellier, CEO of Drooms, notes in the report: due diligence is increasingly becoming a strategic risk-management function, and secure digital infrastructure is a critical differentiator for successful transactions.
Read the full Drooms Report 2026: Executing in an Era of Market Complexities: European M&A and PE Trends and the Technology Imperative here.
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