Most Firms Need Months to Leave Top Cloud Provider
A Leaseweb survey finds few businesses could migrate quickly, a constraint that AI-driven reliance could make harder over three years.
Updated on Nov. 5, 2026 in Data Centers
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A Leaseweb survey finds most businesses could not move workloads off their largest cloud provider quickly. Only 11% of organizations said they could migrate within three weeks, and 55% said it would take over three months or was not currently possible. The research describes current survey findings and stated intentions rather than completed migrations.
Why it matters
Geopolitical tension and digital-sovereignty concerns are pushing firms to reduce dependence on a few infrastructure providers, particularly US cloud vendors. Business leaders expect AI workloads to deepen that reliance over the next three years, which makes migration cost and time a central planning question.
Survey data from Leaseweb shows 65% of Dutch businesses, 59% of UK businesses, 55% of US businesses, and 40% of German businesses expect migration away from their largest cloud provider to take more than three months. The findings rest on self-reported timelines, and the survey does not report whether those estimates reflect tested migration plans.
The players
Leaseweb
A hosting and cloud infrastructure provider that conducted the survey on migration timelines and provider dependence.
The details
Respondents were asked how long it would take to move business-critical workloads, meaning the applications and data a company cannot afford to have offline, away from their largest cloud provider. Organizations most often cite legacy-system complexity as the main barrier, meaning older software built to run on specific infrastructure that is costly to rewrite for another platform. Many firms also report that switching providers requires rebuilding how data, security, and compliance controls work across the new environment.
Timeline
Survey responses describe migration estimates and reliance plans; the core event date is not specified in the source.
Business leaders expect AI to increase provider reliance over the next three years.
The Tech Race
The survey points to a widening gap between firms' stated desire for independence and their operational ability to act on it, a gap that the 78% figure for organizations already taking action highlights. As AI workloads concentrate further on a small set of providers, the cost of switching will likely shape which vendors keep their customers over the coming years.
Companies that rely on a single cloud provider face migration timelines of several months, not weeks, which affects how quickly they can change vendors after a price increase or a policy shift. Firms weighing this trade-off should expect to pay more for control, since 73% of surveyed businesses said they would accept at least an 11% price premium for greater control and freedom to move.
The takeaway
Organizations planning AI deployments should treat provider migration time as a design constraint rather than an afterthought. Watch whether the expected rise in AI-driven provider reliance over the next three years shows up in actual contract concentration data.
Further reading
For background on where this dependence comes from, see the Data Centers section.
Source note: This article includes information reported by ITProUK.
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