External drive files in icloud using SSD space

I have an external drive that I store all my video files, which currently is almost 700gb. I have a folder on iCloud Drive to hold all the videos so they are accessible by my other devices. I recently dragged and dropped several hundred GB of video files from the external drive folder to the same folder on iCloud and that is when I noticed the space on my internal SSD getting smaller and smaller as the files were uploaded to iCloud drive.

So now I have my original videos on my external drive and somewhere on the internal SSD as well as icloud.

My goal is to only have the original on the external drive and copies in iCloud drive.

Is this solvable?