Lengthy contracts between nation-states and corporations, developed and reviewed by teams of lawyers, and enforced by judges, are not exactly "pinky promises."
They will become pinky promises, once Microsoft gets ordered to do something by orange man or some three letters. There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US. It basically doesn't matter what they have in contracts, as US law or just political power with access to enforce that power trumps (ha) any contracts they can sign.
> There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US.
Actually there is, that's what the entire point of the sovereign clouds are. They reside physically in Europe, with legal control by Europeans, and European employees that can't be bossed around by the US. If the US orders Amazon to retrieve data from S3 servers located in a European sovereign cloud, Amazon employees in the US don't have the technical capability to do so, and the European data center employees are legally bound not to.
If those employees were working in a vacuum, then sure, but in reality they are not.
Employees have bosses and those bosses have bosses, and those bosses have bosses in the US. If not direct bosses, then at least people higher up in the context of all of Microsoft, who can pull strings, criticize them, categorize them as unreliable, and make their life hard, or even bring into motion that they are made to give up their position or are let go. Most people don't want a hard life at the job and be bullied. It is likely, that people joining Microsoft don't have the strongest moral compass anyway, so them sticking their neck out for European data protection, and losing what comfy life they have, including probably exceptional ...
Company politics are not to be underestimated. The question becomes who selects and vetoes higher ups in those sovereign clouds.
European governments cannot trust US companies, even when they have inner-EU parts, because influence from the US cannot be rules out.
"Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty:
Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled – however unlikely – to pass local customer info to US admin"
