Germany's three intelligence services are about to get a shared cloud for documents classified up to “Geheim” — secret. The technical foundation will come from Google.
According to reporting by NDR and WDR, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) plan a joint “ND-Cloud” built on an air-gapped edition of Google Distributed Cloud. Air-gapped here means what it says: the system runs autonomously, with no connection to the internet and no link to Google's public cloud. The data is to be stored in Germany, and Google is to have no access. The Bundeswehr's IT house BWI, which announced a Google partnership in the summer, is expected to help operate it. State-level domestic intelligence offices are to be connected later.
The motivation is concrete. Reading a secret-classified document currently means walking to a specially secured “red system” in the office; emailing one is laborious. A shared cloud would let the three agencies exchange material up to the highest classification level electronically for the first time. The BND in particular is expected to collect, store and process more data under strategic reconnaissance, with automated AI-assisted analysis — workloads that isolated single machines cannot carry.
The price tag is estimated at no less than €500 million. Nothing is formally decided: several components are still in certification at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), and budget funds are supposed to be released only after approval. The original go-live in the first quarter of 2027 is slipping.
The technical objection is not about the air gap but about the updates. “The updates would still come from Google. Then the question is: can the operator here even assess what effects an update might have?” Sven Herpig of the independent organisation Interface told ARD's capital studio — and, following on, how large a change must be before a new version has to be re-evaluated and re-certified. That dependency is not theoretical: in France, Google runs the S3NS offering with the defence group Thales, where operations sit with the European partner but software development stays with the US company. Without Google's support, insiders say, such a cloud could keep running for a few months, at best about a year.
The political symbolism is the sharper problem. Handing the core of intelligence data processing to a US hyperscaler reads as an admission that European providers cannot yet match the performance. Many EU-based vendors had hoped security agencies in particular would book them despite higher costs, acting as anchor customers for the investment. The history is not encouraging: Google and Deutsche Telekom presented a high-security cloud in 2021, and by all accounts won not a single customer for the air-gapped variant.
That contradiction is being named politically too. “The security and sovereignty of an intelligence cloud is of outstanding security-policy importance,” said Konstantin von Notz, deputy chair of the parliamentary control committee. It raises questions that the government chose a US provider, he said, and it will have to answer why a European solution was not possible. The agencies themselves are tight-lipped; the BfV said only that its capacity to act depends directly on modern IT platforms and that European solutions are of particular interest for its own resilience. Its president, Sinan Selen, said a year ago that his service ultimately had to be able to offer alternatives.
At the government's Digital Summit in Berlin, which closed on Tuesday and was built around AI, the contrast was hard to miss. Golem.de put it in a headline: the intelligence services are building on Google, and the chancellor calls it European. Friedrich Merz has made digital sovereignty a theme since the 2025 summit with France; this year's event was meant to show progress on AI.
Internationally, the German move follows a well-worn path. Amazon offers US intelligence and the military AWS Secret Cloud; Britain reportedly signed a secret-cloud contract with Amazon in 2021. The unresolved pattern is the same everywhere: hyperscalers supply the software, the state supplies the isolation, and the state stays dependent on the vendor for its evolution.
What to watch: whether the BSI approval comes with binding conditions on update control, whether the parliamentary control committee is formally involved before the budget is released, and whether European vendors get any part of the stack.
