Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that lets you analyse data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. The service is serverless: there is no infrastructure to set up or manage, and queries run in parallel and scale automatically. According to AWS, a single SQL query can also reach data in other sources, on premises or in multicloud environments, and open data formats, open-source frameworks and BI and machine learning tools are supported.
Amazon Athena is a service of Amazon Web Services, part of Amazon.com, Inc. (headquartered in Seattle, Washington), and is therefore subject to US jurisdiction, even in a European region. According to AWS, customers control the region where their customer data is stored. AWS acts as a processor under the GDPR and offers a data processing addendum with Standard Contractual Clauses. Because the parent is a US company, legislation such as the CLOUD Act remains relevant. Choosing a European region helps, but it does not remove the dependency on a US provider.