AI firms in Europe could lose their leading position in machine translation after one of the continent’s top startups decided to work with Amazon’s cloud division, prompting concern across the industry.
Although European businesses have generally trailed the United States and China in adopting artificial intelligence, a handful of European firms have dominated the global market for high‑quality machine translation used by professionals.
The standout example is DeepL, based in Cologne. Its online translator regularly scores higher than Google Translate in accuracy tests. Governments, courts and roughly half of the Fortune 500 companies rely on the service, which reported revenues of $185.2 million last year. Last month DeepL introduced a live voice‑to‑voice translation feature, echoing the fictional Babel fish from Douglas Adams’ 1981 novel *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*.
Shortly before that launch, DeepL told its paying subscribers that it would “no longer process data exclusively on our own servers” and would partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a provider that underpins much of the internet’s infrastructure.
The announcement raised alarms among users and observers in Europe, who argue that the deal strengthens Silicon Valley’s grip on digital infrastructure at a time when the Trump administration’s actions have already sparked worries about tech companies’ autonomy.
Jörg Weishaupt, chief executive and founder of Malogica Group, a software firm headquartered in Madeira, Portugal, said he was unhappy with the change. A long‑time business customer who had praised DeepL’s performance, he decided to cancel his subscription.
His primary worry was that he no longer felt comfortable sending contracts or internal strategy papers to DeepL’s platform. “These are confidential documents, and I need to know where they end up,” he explained.
DeepL responded that AWS would not be able to view or use customer data for any purpose, including training Amazon’s algorithms. A spokesperson stated: “DeepL remains the data processor. We have added AWS as a sub‑processor to supply the infrastructure needed for global scale. AWS will not control or access customer data in any usable form. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and we do not use paid‑service data to train our AI models.”
Weishaupt countered by citing the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001 and the Cloud Act of 2018, which permit the American government to demand information from cloud providers. He noted that, last July, a Microsoft legal director testified under oath in France that the company “cannot guarantee” data sovereignty for EU customers if the Trump administration sought access to data stored on its servers.
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