On May 13, 2026, Boris Siegenthaler signed a document. He did not give a speech before the European Parliament. He did not hire a public relations firm to explain his vision for the digital world. He did not publish a manifesto. He signed a document that transferred the majority of voting rights in Infomaniak Group SA, the cloud company he founded more than thirty years ago in a garden shed near CERN in Geneva, to the Fondation Infomaniak, a Swiss public-interest foundation. Since that date, the company is, in the most precise and radical sense of the term, unsellable.
The word does not exist in the vocabulary of platform capitalism. It does not appear in management handbooks or in the roadmaps of the investment funds that run the technology world from their offices in San Francisco, New York and London. Everything sells. Everything has a price. WhatsApp was worth 19 billion dollars in 2014 when Meta acquired it. Instagram, one year earlier, one billion. TikTok has been in the shop window for years, waiting for some government to find the political formula that would persuade Beijing to hand over the algorithm at a reasonable price. The European cloud sector, presented for years as a sovereign alternative to the American giants, does not escape this logic. Recent history demonstrates that with a brutality requiring no embellishment.
Lyon, August 2025, the dress rehearsal
In August 2025, the American fund Carlyle put 525 million euros on the table to acquire Ciril Group, a Lyon-based operator specializing in data hosting for French local authorities. Municipalities, hospitals, public bodies. Half its clients are public-sector actors managing health records, civil registries, municipal finances. The family owners accepted. What followed was exactly what always follows. Bercy opened an investigation. Several members of parliament wrote to the minister. The Ministry of Economy even considered a parallel Bpifrance stake to soften the sovereignty loss. Institutional noise, parliamentary questions, investigations. Ciril Group ended up, regardless, in the hands of a fund registered under American jurisdiction. The mechanism worked exactly as it was designed to work.
That is the problem. That is what happens when there is no document like the one Siegenthaler signed.
The legal weapon nobody saw coming
The legal instrument that makes such a document urgent has a precise name. The Cloud Act. Adopted by the United States Congress in March 2018, buried in a two-thousand-page budget bill that nobody read in full, the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act amends the Stored Communications Act of 1986, a text drafted when the internet was a university project. The principle it establishes is simple in its formulation and devastating in its consequences. American federal authorities can compel any company under American jurisdiction to produce data it controls, regardless of where that data is physically stored. It does not matter whether the servers are in Frankfurt, Dublin, São Paulo or Geneva. It does not matter whether the data belongs to citizens with no connection to the United States. It does not matter whether the company scrupulously complies with every data protection rule in its home country. What matters, the only criterion the Cloud Act recognises, is the jurisdiction applicable to the provider.
The most troubling aspect of the mechanism is not technical but procedural. No international mutual legal assistance procedure is required. The person or organisation whose data is being sought is not informed. The state where the data physically resides is not consulted. The transaction takes place directly between the American federal agency and the American company. The rest of the world watches from the outside, unaware the operation took place.
In 2019, a report of the French National Assembly described the Cloud Act as “an additional stage of American extraterritorial unilateralism” that entirely ignores the sovereignty of states and the application of their legal norms. The report was debated, well received and filed away. Nothing changed. (French National Assembly, 2019)
What the Cloud Act does is neither an error nor an anomaly correctable by a more careful treaty. It is a deliberate political decision. Geography does not matter. State sovereignty over data is an administrative illusion when it collides with an American federal order.
265 billion euros under foreign jurisdiction
That principle applies to an infrastructure that three American companies control in proportions no European or Latin American debate has managed to reduce significantly. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud capture between 62% and 69% of the global cloud market.
American players absorb 83% of spending on professional cloud software and services in Europe, according to a Cigref study from April 2025. That amounts to 265 billion euros per year under foreign jurisdiction. The main European alternative providers, SAP, Deutsche Telekom and OVH, each hold approximately 2% market share. (Cigref / Asterès, April 2025)
The market has spoken. It has been speaking for decades. Latin America is not in a different position. Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina host their government, healthcare and financial data in infrastructure dominated by the same three actors, subject to the same Cloud Act. AWS is actively expanding its presence in the region with new zones in Mexico and projects in Chile. Cloud use is growing across Latin American countries, but local data protection laws, Brazil’s LGPD, Colombian regulations, Mexican sector rules, have not altered the structural dependency. The data of Latin American citizens, their medical records, their bank transactions, their communications, flow through infrastructure that a United States federal court can demand at any moment, with no warning, no international procedure, no notification to anyone.
Eight years of answers that answer nothing
Europe has been trying to respond to that reality for eight years. Since 2018, the European Council has been working on its e-Evidence directive, its own Cloud Act, aimed at harmonising European electronic evidence production orders. In April 2026, the European Commission awarded a 180 million euro contract to four sovereign cloud projects for its own institutions, described in official communications as a first concrete signal. The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health is trying to exclude Microsoft, Google and IBM from its SwissHDS health data digitisation project because federal government lawyers concluded the Cloud Act is incompatible with medical data protection. Amazon launched its European Sovereign Cloud, a marketing construction that its own legal critics call a fiction. As long as the provider is an American company, operational sovereignty does not produce legal sovereignty. The geography of servers does not change the jurisdiction of the operator. Microsoft raised prices for European customers by up to 25% in 2026, with no government able to do anything but protest.
Signals, say the analysts. Declarations of intent, clarify the ministries. Ongoing processes, confirm the communications offices. They are not signed documents producing immediate and irreversible legal effects.
The wall that actually works
Boris Siegenthaler signed a document that produces immediate and irreversible legal effects.
The architecture he built deserves to be understood in its precision, because it is not symbolic. The Fondation Infomaniak, a recognised Swiss public-interest structure subject to oversight by Geneva cantonal authorities, holds special non-transferable shares conferring 65% of the company’s voting rights while holding only 15% of its economic value. This dissociation between control power and financial value is the core of the device. It separates governance from market logic. No buyer, no investment fund, no heir, no future offer can alter the founding commitments without the Foundation’s agreement. There is no sufficient price because there is no possible sale mechanism. The transaction was unanimously validated by Siegenthaler and the company’s 36 employee shareholders. A signed Charte des participations inscribes in the statutes the principles of independence, digital sovereignty, privacy protection, local anchoring and environmental responsibility. These are enforceable commitments before a court. Not values published on a website.
The company this document protects has a material reality worth specifying. Infomaniak is not an ideological startup living on public subsidies. It invoiced 56 million Swiss francs in 2025, with 17% growth over the previous year, without external capital. Its 316 employees all work in Switzerland, with no outsourcing. Its data centres in Geneva and Zurich are designed and operated without foreign intermediaries. Its new centre at Plan-les-Ouates recovers 100% of electricity consumed to heat 6,000 homes in the Canton of Geneva. Its taxes are paid where value is created, without fiscal optimisation. It has self-financed its development since its founding. It never needed to sell, and that is precisely what makes the document possible.
From the inside
This article is hosted on Infomaniak’s servers. Not as advertising, but as a statement of position. AcidReport chose Infomaniak before that choice became a political declaration, before the foundation existed, before the Cloud Act was being debated in European ministries. This publication’s data sits in Geneva, under Swiss law, in a company that has just legally fortified itself against any foreign acquisition. We knew it was independent. Now it is independent in writing, with consequences no American fund can reverse.
What Siegenthaler did is not the romantic gesture of an entrepreneur with a good conscience. It is cold legal engineering, applied with surgical precision, in service of a concrete and verifiable refusal. The refusal to let digital infrastructure depend on the will of an investment fund requiring quarterly returns, on the succession of a founder whose family might prefer liquidity, on a sufficiently generous offer arriving at the wrong moment. What happened to Ciril Group in Lyon was neither catastrophe nor betrayal. It was the ordinary functioning of the market applied to assets that European states, and Latin American ones, never decided to treat as strategic while they were profitable and convenient to use. Siegenthaler decided not to wait for someone else to make that decision.
Capitalism has a price for everything. On May 13, 2026, in Geneva, one man found a way to ensure his company had none. It is not common. It requires three simultaneous conditions that rarely converge in the same actor. A legal structure enabling that protection, profitability eliminating dependence on external investors, and the willingness to forgo the liquidity a sale would represent at peak value. All three conditions were met. The mechanism exists, it works, and it is available for anyone who wishes to replicate it.
The rest of the world is still waiting for its governments to make that decision…
G.S.
Sources
- Infomaniak, official press release on the creation of the Fondation Infomaniak, May 13, 2026
- Le Temps, “Infomaniak passe sous le contrôle d’une fondation d’utilité publique”, May 20, 2026
- Le Temps, editorial “La Suisse tient un contre-modèle aux géants américains du numérique”, May 20, 2026
- Le Journal des Entreprises, “Le rachat de Ciril Group par Carlyle scruté de près par Bercy”, August 2025
- Cigref / Asterès, study on European dependence on American cloud, April 2025
- Bilan.ch, “Cloud Act: les données en Europe restent accessibles aux USA”, December 2025
- 24 Heures, “L’OFSP veut exclure les géants tech américains d’un projet de numérisation”, May 2026
- Usine Digitale, “Amazon, Microsoft et Google règnent sur le cloud européen”, May 2026
- IT for Business, “AWS lance son European Sovereign Cloud avec une naïveté calculée très américaine”, January 2026
- PME.ch, “Infomaniak, l’alternative aux GAFAM”, April 2026
- ICTjournal, “Infomaniak verrouille son indépendance via une fondation”, May 2026
- SP Global Market Intelligence, “Hyperscalers continue global data center expansion”, February 2026
- United States Congress, Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (Cloud Act), March 2018
- French National Assembly, report on the sovereignty of European companies facing American jurisdiction, 2019
