Paris (France) (AFP) – The government wants to succeed by the end of the year in removing Microsoft from hosting the large public health data warehouse for research, a new sign of a growing desire to free itself from American tech giants.

Published on: 02/06/2026 - 9:49 p.m.

From Monday, a procedure will be launched to find a new host for the Health Data Platform, or Health Data Hub, the three ministries of Health, State Reform and Digital announced on Friday.

This host will be chosen from among cloud operators (cloud computing) with the SecNumCloud label. This guarantees security against any extra-community interference on data, and effectively excludes the American giants.

The government wants to achieve a total transfer of the platform "by the end of 2026", according to the ministries.

Launched in 2019, the health data platform will eventually contain a copy of all Health Insurance data on French people, making it a veritable Alibaba cave for researchers and artificial intelligence engines.

It has been hosted since its creation on the Microsoft cloud. This choice had from the start aroused the anger of French players in the sector, and defenders of civil liberties, worried about the risk of interference by the American authorities in this data.

American laws in fact allow the country's administration to demand from American cloud players the data they hold, anywhere in the world.

The CNIL, guardian of the digital freedoms of the French, also demanded, without success until now, that the government quickly appoint a European host.

“Since the second Trump presidency, things are starting to move” among political leaders on the question of digital independence, commented on Friday an actor in the French digital industry wishing to remain anonymous.

“I would say the unblocking took place last summer,” when Trump expressed his views on Venezuela and Greenland, he continued. “There was a real acceleration” at that time.

“Awareness”

"Political leaders are saying to themselves 'and if the situation ever gets worse, and if Trump cuts off our access to software, what can we do to ensure business continuity?'" in the French economy, this source said.

“Digital sovereignty”, or the ability to be able to control data and their exploitation, “is a subject that is becoming more promising”, also welcomes the Vendée MP Philippe Latombe (Ensemble), who has been defending this cause for years.

“I would have preferred that political leaders became aware sooner” of the importance of the issue, but the transfer of the Health Data Hub “is good news,” he told AFP.

The players likely to take over from Microsoft are few in number.

Among the operators qualified SecNumCloud by Anssi, the guardian of French IT security, include the French players OVH, Cloud Temple, and S3ns (read "Sens"), an operator formed by the French group Thales but which uses Google's "cloud" technology.

Orange, which has joined forces with Capgemini to exploit Microsoft's "cloud" technology, has requested its SecNumCloud qualification. But he has not yet formally obtained it, according to consistent sources.

Among other signs of the government's desire to free itself from non-European digital tools, there is also the announcement on Thursday by Bercy of an upcoming circular imposing technological sovereignty as one of the first criteria for public purchasing of digital products and services.

At the end of January, the minister responsible for state reform David Amiel called for "an end to dependence on American tools" and announced the generalization, by 2027, of a "100% French" videoconferencing solution within the administration, called Visio.

© 2026 AFP

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