EU Sovereignty Score
Non-EU vendorData Platform & WarehouseHeadquarters: US

Snowflake: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Snowflake is a cloud data platform, which the company calls the AI Data Cloud, for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering and data sharing. It offers sharing across clouds, a marketplace for third-party data and apps, governance with role-based access control and data masking, AI features through Snowflake Cortex, and Snowpark for Python, Java and Scala code. Snowflake is a fully managed service that runs on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Snowflake is a publicly listed US company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The software is proprietary and not open source. Accounts run in regions of the three clouds, in Europe including Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris and Zurich on AWS and Frankfurt on Google Cloud. A European organisation can therefore keep data in an EU region, but the vendor falls under US jurisdiction, including the CLOUD Act, and the underlying infrastructure belongs to a US cloud provider.

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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 (US, EU)
  • 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 July 2, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelVendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingUS, EUVerified by hand
Open-sourceNoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Compliance documents1 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signalCLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
CategoryData Platform & Warehouse
TypeProduct
Websitesnowflake.com ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Snowflake

The European alternatives to Snowflake 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

12 European Data Platform & Warehouse 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 Snowflake

Snowflake 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.

Snowflake hosts data in US, EU. 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.

Snowflake 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 Snowflake 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 Snowflake?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Snowflake include DuckDB, Meilisearch and Aiven. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Snowflake?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Snowflake include DuckDB, Meilisearch and Elastic. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Snowflake GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Snowflake is headquartered in US and hosts data in US, EU. 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 July 2, 2026.

Sources

This record was checked via the vendor's website and legal notice during the full audit of June and July 2026. Source links have been recorded per record since 20 September 2026.

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".

Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
snowflake.com/legal/

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

CSA STARConfirmed in registry

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Data Platform & Warehouse

Data Platform & Warehouse: Lakehouses, cloud data warehouses, data-lake storage and analytical databases for enterprise-wide analysis. 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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8 European alternatives to Snowflake — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score