Moving to a different cloud provider used to be expensive enough that most companies simply didn't. Getting your data out cost money per gigabyte, the migration took months, and the contract renewed itself in the meantime. Since September 2025 that has changed legally, and in January 2027 the last financial barrier disappears.
The EU Data Act is a European regulation that gives you the right to switch cloud services within fixed deadlines, caps switching charges immediately, and bans them outright from 12 January 2027. The rules have applied since 12 September 2025 and cover every provider of data processing services selling to customers in the EU, wherever that provider is based.
This guide explains the exact deadlines and charges, which services fall in scope, and what it means for your cloud and AI contracts. Note: this is general information, not legal advice. Have your own contracts reviewed by a lawyer.
What does the EU Data Act require of cloud contracts?
The Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) is broader than cloud, but the switching chapter is the part that hits buyers directly. The principle is that a provider may no longer slow down your move to a competitor or to your own infrastructure, either technically or commercially.
In practice it imposes three things. First, your contract itself must describe the switching process: how you give notice, which deadlines apply, which data and digital assets you take with you, and in what format. Second, the provider must give you information about available switching procedures before you sign. Third, it must be transparent about the measures it takes against unlawful access to your data by governments outside the EU.
That last point is the quiet win for European organizations. Where digital sovereignty for AI in the Netherlands was until recently a strategic preference with no contractual hook, the Data Act now gives you a concrete question your provider is required to answer.
Which deadlines apply when you switch?
The regulation sets hard maximums. A provider cannot hold you longer than the table below, even if your contract says otherwise.
| Element | Maximum under the Data Act |
|---|---|
| Notice period to start the switch | 2 months |
| Transitional period for porting data | 30 days |
| Extension where porting is technically unfeasible | up to 7 months |
| Switching charges until 12 January 2027 | actual costs incurred only |
| Switching charges from 12 January 2027 | zero |
Those thirty days are the most consequential number. A migration that used to be scheduled "sometime this year" now has a statutory end date. The extension to seven months is not a loophole: the provider has to show that porting within thirty days is genuinely unfeasible.
One detail worth knowing: early termination penalties on a running contract remain permitted. The ban covers the cost of switching itself, not the commitment you made on contract length. Signing a three-year term still buys you an obligation.
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What changes on 12 January 2027?
Until 12 January 2027, a provider may charge for switching, but only up to the costs it actually incurs for that switch. Markup is not allowed. That means classic egress fees, the per-gigabyte charges you pay to remove your own data from a cloud, already cannot be run as a profit centre.
From 12 January 2027 the remainder falls away too. Moving to another provider or to your own server room must cost nothing on the departing provider's side. For organizations holding tens of terabytes, that is the difference between a bill in the tens of thousands and zero.
IaaS providers carry a heavier duty on top: they must help you achieve functional equivalence, so your environment works comparably at the new provider. For PaaS and SaaS the obligation is lighter and in practice limited to exporting data and digital assets in a structured, commonly used format.
Which services are in scope?
The Data Act refers to data processing services. That covers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, plus storage, database-as-a-service and edge computing. It is a wide definition: your CRM, your accounting package and your data warehouse are in scope just as much as your virtual servers.
Services delivered largely bespoke, where the provider is structurally involved in running them, fall outside because they aren't standard off-the-shelf services. The switching chapter also applies only to customers in the EU, and it is the customer's location that decides, not the provider's. A US provider selling to a Dutch customer is covered.
What the law does not do is perform your migration. The legal barrier disappears; the technical one stays. For the practical side, see our guide on switching software vendors.
What does this mean for your AI stack?
With AI services, the dependency rarely sits in storage costs. It sits in model choice, in prompts and configurations tuned to one provider, and in vector databases holding embeddings that differ per model. The Data Act gives you a right to your data and digital assets, but a set of embeddings that is meaningless under a different model stays practically meaningless.
That makes the law a good prompt rather than a solution. If you want an AI environment that genuinely moves, you look at open model weights, open formats, and an architecture that treats the model provider as a replaceable component. Our guide on migrating from cloud AI to local AI walks through that route, including what it costs and where it goes wrong.
The broader principle is the same as with any supplier decision: you arrange freedom up front. See our guide on avoiding vendor lock-in for the five forms of dependency and the contract terms that cover them.
How do you prepare for a switch now?
Four actions deliver the most in the short term.
Map your contracts by renewal date. Contracts running past 12 January 2027 can be left at no switching cost under the new regime. That is a negotiating position you can use in renewal talks today.
Ask your current provider for the mandatory information. Switching procedure, formats, deadlines, and the measures against government access to data. The answer tells you more about the relationship than the contract does.
Test one export. A right to export is worth nothing until you've used it. Pull one dataset and check whether it is usable without the provider's software.
Write the new deadlines into your procurement standard. Two months' notice, thirty days' transition and zero switching cost belong in every cloud contract you sign from now on. For the wider legal context of AI procurement, our pillar on AI legislation in the Netherlands and the EU AI Act is the place to start.
Conclusion: the barrier goes, the preparation doesn't
The EU Data Act removes the financial and contractual obstacle that made switching unattractive for years. From 12 January 2027, leaving is free, inside thirty days, with a notice period of at most two months.
What remains is the technical groundwork: open formats, documented integrations, and an architecture that doesn't lean on one provider's exclusive services. We help organizations set up their cloud and AI architecture so that switching is a scheduling question rather than a rebuild.