Not really a joke at all, the point is to find a cloud provider that can place resources in a guaranteed location that stays within the legal boundaries of a country.
This is for when you need to guarantee that your services cannot possibly escape boundaries of a specific country.
I think the "joke" is if the US government orders a company to hand over that data, the fact that the servers are physically in the EU won't stop anything
It's one thing if they require the copy of data, and another thing if the President wakes up in a bad mood and orders deleting all the data. Imagine if the whole computing infrastructure for power plants, public transportation, banks, payment systems, large companies gets deleted in a minute.
You should not host the critical data on other country's servers.
You obviously haven't heard of the cloud act, which american cloud providers must follow. Microsoft will do as they are told by Trump - "turn off access to the ICC's criminal prosecutor for Gaza" - "yes boss".
Sovereign cloud might theoretically mean sovereign control over data.
Does absolutely jack shit about the blocs trade deficit in the cloud services space though. Hundreds of billions of euros being sent abroad every year.
Without some kind of collective trade policy [1] sovereign cloud initiatives will continue to be a waste of time for everyone involved (including engineers). Also if you see the phrase Gaia-X ... run.
This is for when you need to guarantee that your services cannot possibly escape boundaries of a specific country.