10 years of T Cloud Public – 
Europe’s No. 1

In this article, you will read

• why T Cloud Public is Europe’s number one public cloud,
• how it evolved to reach that position
• and what lies ahead for T Cloud Public.

The European hyperscaler is coming—creating the perfect complement to multi-cloud strategies and sovereign applications. T Cloud Public, Europe’s No. 1, marks ten years in 2026 and has continuously evolved in step with the market’s growing demands.

The year 2016 was remarkable. The two comets P/2016 BA14 and 252P/LINEAR passed close to Earth, the Elbphilharmonie concert hall was completed, and Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Germany’s men’s national handball team became European champions, and the women’s national soccer team won Olympic gold. At CeBIT, a small cloud startup made its first appearance: the Open Telekom Cloud.

Ten internet years later, in 2026, that small seedling has matured. Now known as T Cloud Public, it has become a permanent fixture in the European public cloud landscape. Multiple studies confirm its position as one of Europe’s leading cloud providers. For us, that raises a central question: why?

First, the facts. For eight consecutive years, T Cloud Public, formerly Open Telekom Cloud, has been recognized as a market leader in the ISG Provider Lens™. In 2018, the benchmark was still called “Cloud Transformation/Operation Services & XaaS.” At that time, Open Telekom Cloud had just entered the leader quadrant and still trailed the “Big Three”—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—as well as IBM.

By 2025, the provider comparison had been renamed “Multi Public Cloud Services,” and the competitive field had intensified significantly. What remains unchanged is T Cloud Public’s position as a market leader, now also in Switzerland. In 2025, it even surpassed Google Cloud in the ranking. As the analysts conclude: “Deutsche Telekom/T-Systems is the leading cloud service provider in Germany … With the Open Telekom Cloud, it offers a comprehensive public cloud infrastructure distinguished by robust services, top-tier security, and flexibility.”

ISG’s assessment is not an isolated case. T Cloud Public also ranks among the leaders in the Forrester Wave™, the user vote by Vogel IT, and the iX Provider Check. This recognition reflects sustained performance, strong customer relationships, and the ability to meet evolving market demands. Since 2024, digital sovereignty has come further into focus, a topic that T Cloud Public has championed from the outset. Data remains in Europe, security and compliance meet the highest standards, and the platform offers stability and transparency for long-term planning.

From the very beginning, one thing was clear: the cloud is an ideal platform for high-performance computing. Large-scale, temporary resources are particularly valuable for projects such as CERN, where T Cloud Public provides computing power and storage to support the analysis of particle physics experiments.

In 2020, product management evaluated the potential of Xen and KVM and made a strategic decision to adopt KVM, a choice that proved forward-looking. While Xen gradually lost strategic relevance and became limited to niche applications, KVM established itself as the standard hypervisor for OpenStack-based cloud infrastructures, as well as for telco and enterprise environments. Its close integration with the Linux ecosystem and broad industry support provide planning reliability, continuous innovation, and long-term stability. In the same year, T Cloud Public achieved BSI C5 Type 2 certification and received the Green Magenta Seal. These milestones underscore its high security and compliance standards and its clear commitment to sustainability.

In 2021, the focus shifted to strengthening partnerships. With the Circle Partner Program, T Cloud Public established an ecosystem for PaaS and SaaS solutions. Transformation partners and customers benefited from a structured, multi-level training program that included Essentials, Fundamentals, Practitioner, and Architect tracks. By the end of the year, T Cloud Public expanded its European footprint by opening a second twin-core location in Almere. This expansion enabled geo-redundant disaster recovery scenarios that meet the highest standards.

A few months later, Swiss T Cloud Public was launched as a community cloud tailored to the Swiss enterprise market. Additional milestones included financial addenda, and the introduction of Confidential Computing. These measures further supported customers in meeting strict compliance requirements. More locations and more certifications reinforced the sovereignty of the European cloud.

By 2023, artificial intelligence had become a defining force. Cloud platforms required advanced GPU resources to support both development and operations. T Cloud Public introduced A100 GPUs and, one year later, added H100 GPUs to meet growing demand for “GPU as a Service.” It also launched the AI assistant “Cloudia,” designed to unlock AI potential for website visitors. Cloudia demonstrated innovative strength and contributed to T Cloud Public’s leading position in the Forrester Wave, alongside serverless functions and large language models available through the Marketplace. The “LLM Hub” quickly became a success story, providing users with a readily available foundation for AI services. During this period, T Cloud Public also surpassed the milestone of 1 exabyte of stored data.

Progress continued on both the technical and sovereignty fronts. With the introduction of the latest CPU generation, Intel® Xeon® 6900, and its listing for IT-Grundschutz certification, T Cloud Public is taking significant steps toward the future in early 2026.

T Cloud Public is not only a core component of Deutsche Telekom’s cloud strategy but also a building block for future European cloud infrastructure. European companies require a future-proof complement to US hyperscalers in order to implement their multi-cloud sovereignty strategies.
The roadmap focuses on continuously improving performance and functionality, expanding services and features, and steadily narrowing the gap with leading US hyperscalers. Under the T Cloud umbrella, T Cloud Public is integrated with the Industrial AI Cloud, launched in February 2026. This integration provides users with streamlined access to extensive high-end GPU resources.

T Cloud Public demonstrates that digital sovereignty and high performance can go hand in hand. It shows that European cloud providers can compete internationally while meeting the specific requirements of European enterprises.