De Nederlandsche Bank signs with Schwarz Digits (Lidl’s IT arm) via STACKIT, explicitly cutting dependence on US hyperscalers over Cloud Act and geopolitical risk.
Key Takeaways
DNB cites the US Cloud Act directly: American providers are legally required to hand data to US authorities, a non-starter for a central bank.
STACKIT started as internal infrastructure for Lidl and Kaufland; it now counts SAP, Bayern Munich, Deutsche Bahn, and DNB as external clients.
Schwarz Digits announced an €11B investment in a new data center in Lübbenau, positioning STACKIT as a sovereign European alternative to AWS, Azure, and GCP.
DNB acknowledged last October that European cloud “is not yet as robust or high-quality” as US alternatives, yet signed anyway, signaling compliance and sovereignty trump raw capability.
The Schleswig-Holstein government’s struggling migration from Microsoft to open source is the live cautionary reference point for this class of move.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters are skeptical the contract signing is news: migration execution is the hard part, and similar European public-sector moves have stalled or failed; a 5-year check-in is the real test.
A recurring theme is that early lock-in to AWS-native services (S3, DynamoDB, EC2-specific tooling) is the root problem; portable VM-first architecture would have made any future exit much cheaper.
STACKIT’s pricing surprised several readers: it is not budget cloud despite the Lidl brand; commenters flag it as expensive, comparable to hyperscaler rates, not a discount play.
Notable Comments
@speedgoose: clarifies STACKIT is a costly enterprise cloud, not cheap like Lidl’s grocery stores – corrects a widespread assumption in the thread.
@junto: asks whether STACKIT is an OpenStack revival, drawing a direct line to Rackspace’s early-2010s API-first model and its collapse after the private-equity buyout.
