Non-EU vendorAIHeadquarters: US

Amazon SageMaker: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Amazon SageMaker is Amazon Web Services' platform for data, analytics and AI. According to AWS, the next generation of SageMaker is the centre for these workloads. It includes SageMaker AI (formerly Amazon SageMaker) for building, training and deploying machine-learning and foundation models, SageMaker Unified Studio as a shared development environment, SageMaker Catalog for governing and sharing data and AI assets, and SageMaker Lakehouse for access to data in S3, Redshift and external sources. It is a managed cloud service used through the AWS console or APIs.

Amazon Web Services is part of Amazon, a US company, so the service falls under US jurisdiction, including the CLOUD Act. Customers choose the AWS Region in which their data is stored, and SageMaker AI is available in several European Regions, including Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich. AWS offers a data processing addendum with standard contractual clauses for transfers to third countries. The platform is proprietary. A European organisation that wants EU processing should pick a European Region and check whether each component is available there.

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Sovereignty score

27 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-350
Hosting inside and outside Europe (EU, CH, US)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
Key management with a non-European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 11, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	EU, CH, USVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Category	AI
Type	Product
Website	aws.amazon.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Amazon SageMaker

The European alternatives to Amazon SageMaker come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

55 European AI vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Amazon SageMaker hosts data in EU, CH, US. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

Amazon SageMaker is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Amazon SageMaker together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Amazon SageMaker?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Amazon SageMaker include Aleph Alpha, Almato and Almawave. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Amazon SageMaker?

Our list of EU alternatives to Amazon SageMaker is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

Is Amazon SageMaker GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Amazon SageMaker is headquartered in US and hosts data in EU, CH, US. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 11, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in AI

AI: Artificial intelligence — large language models, translation, generative AI. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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