Almost half of European businesses have yet to adopt cloud computing services, even as the technology becomes an essential prerequisite for the deployment of AI across the continent, according to a new analysis by the cloud computing specialist, Colibri Digital. But cloud adoption rates vary dramatically across different parts of the continent, creating a picture of a two-speed Europe where digital leaders and digital laggards are growing further apart by the year.
Finland leads the continent with 79.21 per cent cloud adoption, followed by Italy (75.60 per cent), Malta (74.87 per cent), Ireland (73.04 per cent), and Sweden (72.00 per cent). At the other end of the scale, Bulgaria (17.83 per cent), Greece (24.33 per cent), and Romania (24.94 per cent) have all seen fewer than a quarter of their businesses make the shift to cloud infrastructure.
The divide is also deeply structural. Among large enterprises, 84.67 per cent now use paid cloud services. That figure drops to 66.78 per cent for medium-sized businesses, and to just 49.30 per cent for small businesses, meaning that approximately half of Europe’s small businesses are yet to adopt cloud services at all.
Ben Wheeler, Head of Cloud Engineering at Colibri Digital, said:
“These numbers show us that Europe’s digital transformation story has two very different (and conflicting) narratives. You’ve got a cluster of countries where cloud computing is now the default infrastructure for business operations… and then you’ve got a large part of the continent where businesses are still mostly making do without it. While we refer to that as a cloud computing divide, it’s increasingly going to become a productivity divide, a competitiveness divide, and an AI-readiness divide. You can’t run production-grade AI on infrastructure that was designed for a pre-cloud world.”
The Eurostat data also goes beyond headline adoption figures to examine the sophistication of cloud usage among businesses already on the cloud. Of European businesses using paid cloud services, 77.53 per cent are purchasing sophisticated services, including platform-as-a-service (PaaS), database hosting, and cloud security. A further 10.55 per cent are still only using basic cloud services such as email and file storage, with 10.79 per cent sitting somewhere between those two categories.
Cloud maturity, much like adoption, is unevenly distributed. Finland leads again, with 65.90 per cent of Finnish businesses using sophisticated cloud services. Denmark (64.98 per cent), the Netherlands (62.00 per cent), and Italy (61.90 per cent) follow closely, while Latvia (26.12 per cent), Greece (18.53 per cent), and Bulgaria (13.91 per cent) lag well behind.
The relationship between cloud infrastructure and AI capability is where the stakes become particularly acute. The ONS survey found that 91 per cent of firms currently using AI also use cloud computing, underlining cloud as a near-universal prerequisite for AI deployment.
Wheeler added:
“If you’re a business leader looking at your AI strategy in 2026 and you haven’t sorted out your cloud infrastructure, you’re starting at the wrong place. The businesses we work with that get the most from AI investments aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated models. They’re the ones with clean, accessible data underpinned by resilient cloud architecture. It’s the foundation that determines what’s possible above it.”
For businesses in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and other lower-adoption markets, the gap is not simply a matter of catching up on technology. As AI adoption accelerates among cloud-ready competitors, the productivity differential identified by the ONS is likely to compound, and the window to close it is narrowing.
