united-states, business-registration, united-kingdom, germany, europeI am interested in using Microsoft’s German datacenter
If I select “Germany” in this pricing page, I get the following alert
Azure Germany is available to customers and partners in the European Union (EU) and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and provides data residency in Germany with additional levels of control and data protection with a modest price uplift over global cloud offerings (% varies per service).
What do I need to do to establish a presence in the EU?
Europe is a big place - Establishing your presence will vary from country to country. Many countries will have the ability to have shell company that is common in places like Delaware - most (all?) countries require a representative in the country and you can pay someone to be that representative. They are popular but considered shady tax shelters by some. Typically the lower the corporation tax, the more popular these umbrella shell like facilities are.
An alternative solution you might want to read into is “e-residency”. Estonia has started this - I have no first hand experience or knowledge of it.
https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/
IMPORTANT SIDENOTE: Residency (and e-residency) is not citizenship. Any contract that expects a “presence” typically references to residency, not citizenship. Example: Switzerland will not extradite its own citizens to the US, but they will extradite residents.
I suspect e-residency would be easiest and cost friendly to your pocket as it would give you to freedom to have a presence within the EU without surrendering your US passport. But… note… the risks are all yours… I’m not promoting the service as the ultimate solution, but I suspect its one possible solution - you decide.
As I understand it, you want to buy Microsoft services that are available only to EU/EFTA entities. So you need to ask Microsoft what they will accept as proof.
Armed with that answer, you then have to decide whether to create a (Microsoft rules) compliant vehicle, or find a local partner.
Last time I looked, Amazon required US status for customers of its Mechanical Turk service, giving rise to a vibrant industry of US “agents” working hard to stay (just) within the letter of Amazon terms while supporting international clients.
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