Despite Ireland’s reputation as one of Europe’s leading technology hubs, almost three in ten Irish businesses have still not adopted cloud computing services, according to Europe-wide data from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency.
Ireland ranks fourth in Europe for cloud computing adoption, with 73.04 per cent of Irish businesses using paid cloud computing services. That leaves 26.96 per cent of Irish enterprises without cloud infrastructure, even as cloud technologies become an increasingly essential prerequisite for artificial intelligence adoption.
The figures, which are based on an analysis by the cloud computing specialist, Colibri Digital, also reveal a persistent divide by business size. Among large enterprises across the EU, 84.67 per cent now use paid cloud services, but that figure falls to 66.78 per cent for medium-sized businesses and to just 49.30 per cent for small businesses. That means half of Europe’s small businesses remain on the wrong side of the cloud divide.
Discussing the new analysis, Ben Wheeler, Head of Cloud Engineering at Colibri Digital, said:
“Ireland’s tech sector is among the most advanced in Europe, but these figures are a reminder that cloud adoption isn’t uniform across the whole economy. When almost a third of Irish businesses are still operating without cloud infrastructure, that’s a meaningful drag on productivity and competitiveness. While we refer to it as a cloud computing divide, it’s increasingly going to become a productivity divide, a competitiveness divide, and an AI-readiness divide. You can’t run production-grade AI on infrastructure that was designed for a pre-cloud world.”
The Eurostat survey, which covered enterprises with at least 10 employees across all EU member states, Norway, and selected candidate countries, also goes beyond headline adoption rates to examine the sophistication of cloud usage. Of all European businesses using paid cloud services, 77.53 per cent are buying sophisticated services including platform-as-a-service (PaaS), database hosting, and cloud security. However, 10.55 per cent are still using only the most basic cloud services such as email and file storage, with a further 10.79 per cent falling somewhere in between.
Ireland performs well on cloud maturity relative to the European average. Of all Irish enterprises, 46.92 per cent are using sophisticated cloud services, above the EU average of 40.89 per cent. Even so, only 18.52 per cent of Irish cloud users have adopted platform-as-a-service tools for application development and deployment, pointing to limited uptake of the more advanced cloud capabilities that underpin AI and data-intensive workloads.
Wheeler added:
“If you’re an Irish business leader looking at your AI strategy in 2026 and you haven’t sorted out your cloud infrastructure, you’re starting at the wrong place. The businesses we work with that get the most from AI investments aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated models. They’re the ones with clean, accessible data underpinned by resilient cloud architecture. It’s the foundation that determines what’s possible above it.”
While the Eurostat data doesn’t provide cloud adoption rates for Scotland, some industry estimates suggest that between 55 per cent and 60 per cent of Scottish businesses have adopted comparable cloud computing solutions to those that feature in the Eurostat data.
