Dutch Universities Join Forces with Government to Break Free from US Big Tech

After years of warnings from academics and a unanimous parliamentary motion last autumn, Dutch universities are now sitting down with the central government and IT cooperative SURF to draw up a concrete plan to reduce their reliance on American big tech. A new committee, set up specifically to deal with digital autonomy in higher education, has begun its work this month, financial daily Het Financieele Dagblad reported.

The committee is chaired by Alexandra van Huffelen, president of Radboud University Nijmegen and the Netherlands' first-ever state secretary for digitalisation. "We don't want to switch from one major provider to another," she told the FD, summing up the difficulty of moving away from Microsoft, Google and Amazon without simply landing in another concentrated dependence.

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How deep the reliance goes

To understand why this is so complicated, it helps to see how far the dependence has gone. A decade ago, every Dutch university still ran its own computing centre, fourteen universities, fourteen centres. Today there is one left, the Snellius supercomputer in Amsterdam's Watergraafsmeer, and according to media and digital society professor José van Dijck, even that one is "completely full."

In her own institution, Utrecht University, Van Dijck has put the situation bluntly: "We've almost become a Microsoft university." Once you are on the Azure cloud, she has noted, you are essentially pulled into Microsoft's other services as well.

The pattern repeats across the country. Email, document storage, video calls, learning environments, identity management, and increasingly AI tools, all run on the infrastructure of a handful of US companies. Roughly two-thirds of all Dutch digital services rely on American cloud providers, recent estimates suggest.

That dependence built up gradually, but accelerated sharply during the coronavirus pandemic. SURF and the universities had been developing their own services, like the open source video platform Jitsi, but as Van Dijck has pointed out, the rush to digitise teaching during lockdowns left no time to keep building alternatives.

What pushed the issue back up the agenda

Concerns about this dependence are not new. Dutch academics began raising alarms during Donald Trump's first term as president, around 2019. What changed in the past year is that the abstract risks have become very concrete.

A pivotal moment came when Microsoft was reported to have closed the email account of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, after US sanctions. For Dutch institutions, especially those producing research that does not always align with foreign governments' political views, the message was hard to miss: a foreign company, under foreign law, can pull the plug.

There are also concerns about US surveillance laws such as the Cloud Act and Section 702 of FISA, which can in principle compel American firms to hand over data stored on their systems regardless of where the servers physically sit. And in the Netherlands itself, alarm spread through parliament when it emerged that an American company could acquire Solvinity, the Dutch firm whose software powers DigiD, the country's national digital ID system.

What the committee will do

The new committee brings together the universities, central government and SURF, the IT cooperative for Dutch education and research. Its core job is to coordinate, in particular pooling purchasing power, sharing alternatives, and building exit strategies so that institutions are not stuck if a single supplier goes down or pulls a service.

For Van Huffelen, having the central government at the table is essential. Joint negotiation gives universities and the state much more leverage when sitting opposite global suppliers, and joint investment can keep European alternatives alive long enough to mature. "This is about the heart of what universities are," she said. "About academic freedom, about protecting our data."

Universities already moving

Even before the committee, individual universities had begun acting. The University of Groningen has set itself the goal of being digitally independent by 2030, and plans to invest €500,000 in 2027, rising to €1.5 million per year by 2030, in alternatives. Radboud University now issues staff with Dutch-made Fairphone smartphones instead of iPhones. TU Delft stores most of its research data in two of its own data centres, while Tilburg University has set strict contractual conditions on data access, security and the location of where data is held.

SURF has taken on a central role. After running an internal pilot, it is now rolling out Nextcloud, a German-developed open source alternative to parts of Microsoft 365, to more than 30 Dutch educational institutions, with around 2,000 users in the first phase. Nextcloud is already in use at around fifty German universities, and offers document collaboration, file sharing, email integration and online meetings. Earlier this year, SURF was also explicitly named in an open letter from across all fourteen Dutch universities, signed by hundreds of academics, as the partner best placed to lead a shift away from big tech.

A wider Dutch shift

The universities' move dovetails with a broader push for "digital sovereignty" elsewhere in the Dutch state. In November 2025, all 150 members of the Tweede Kamer voted in favour of a motion from GroenLinks-PvdA and D66 telling the government to work "structurally" with universities and colleges to break the dependence on big tech. Several Dutch municipalities have announced their own moves away from American suppliers, with around forty smaller municipalities jointly building a sovereign cloud environment based on open source standards.

In December 2025, the cabinet adopted a new Vision on Digital Autonomy and Sovereignty, summarised by demissionary state secretary Eddie van Marum as "open where it can, protect where it must." The new Jetten cabinet went further in its coalition agreement, promising to scale back "strategic dependencies" in cloud and critical systems, to introduce national digital "stress tests", and to set up a new central agency, the Nederlandse Digitale Dienst, to enforce common standards across ministries.

Realism, not revolution

Despite the energy, university leaders are careful not to promise a quick exit. As Caspar van den Berg, chair of Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), and others have repeatedly stressed, fully replacing big tech in a few years is not a serious prospect. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are deeply woven into research, teaching and administration, and European alternatives are still maturing in quality, scale and feature set. Critics also warn that simply requiring open source or European-only suppliers will not, on its own, deliver real independence: contracts, governance, exit strategies and even staffing all have to be redesigned.

What is changing, observers say, is the direction of travel. Where Dutch institutions used to outsource by default, the default is shifting to "ask first." Whether that is fast enough to keep pace with rapid changes in AI and cloud infrastructure remains to be seen. But after years of opinion pieces and warnings, the country's universities, government and IT cooperative are now, at least, working from the same plan.