Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native • Hacker News Board

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#301

Post by Nextgrid » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #109

p1anecrazy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be the change you wish to see. If professionals like you join European companies it will help grow their business and offer competitive salaries.

That's absolutely not how any of this works. If they can get top talent for half the salary they won't suddenly start paying more. There is only one solution: EU governments heavily subsidize those European cloud providers which enables them to offer top salaries and therefore attract top talent.

It would also help not taxing those incomes at 60%.

Every time I look at a permanent role in Europe, if I didn't already close the tab based on the offered salary, I plug the number into a take-home calculator and then I close the tab for sure.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#302

Post by bjackman » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

armcat wrote: post #215

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US. And Office suite wise, it took…

there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too. it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard be…

Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.

Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?

I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:

1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).

2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#303

Post by dmix » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

nixpulvis wrote: post #249

kioku wrote: post #43

> This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight‑up national economic security play. The woes of LLM contrasts… In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for European companies and should make everyone consider the implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.

Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way. So now what? How do w…

> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way

The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.

> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.

> isolationism is a death sentence

The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#304

Post by ExoticPearTree » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

Juliate wrote: post #229

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US. And Office suite wise, it took…

> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business. Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them. It's a matter of strategy and of cho…

It's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones.

You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.

Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#305

Post by rm30 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #208

albert_e wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just geographic regions around the globe. It is also the wide array of services -- well integrated into their primitives of security, authentication, governance, monitoring and logging, etc Is there a EU cloud provider that provides -- even if limited to EU geography -- the equivalent of Blob Storage + Azure Data Lake Storage + Azure Data Factory or Fabric + Microsoft Foundry with native access to OpenAI and…

Having used both worlds: a lot of the provided features come with strong vendor lock-in, and in most cases that not, with slightly stronger “local” engineering you can reach the same targets and needs locally. The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that are less coupled to cloud features. If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is well…

The irony is that EU education is still broader and more grounded in fundamentals, compared to US one that has become increasingly skills-oriented.

I also prefer to design solutions that are portable and platform independent, cloud providers simplify and hide something to you, it has a cost (not just money) that you cannot quantify on long term and that's clear for who has experience in both worlds.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#306

Post by rvnx » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

MonkeyClub wrote: post #231

gregman1 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik Hetzner has a couple of server locations in the USA. Is it correct to say that Hetzner has to comply to US CLOUD Act and therefore give away any data requested?

Depends on which data center you're hosted. The one under US jurisdiction operated by Hetzner US LLC must comply, while the German ones are operating under the GDPR, which has extraterritorial clauses can can deny or challenge the request.

It's not that guaranteed.

The reality is that if you have any interest, company or employees in the US you can be coerced to do anything the US government wants.

Either legally through courts, or through business influence, or through harassment (e.g. hardcore checks from the IRS).

Sorry, Stripe rejects you now because you are high-risk (you have to explain why you refuse to help in criminal cases, though there is a court requesting you).

You don't like to comply to US requests and protect terrorists ?

https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-to-resolve-blocks-o...

Still don't comply ?

You are added to sanctions list, end of the game.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0185

Even Microsoft acknowledges that these cross-border requests cannot be avoided.

https://www.convotis.com/es/en/news/microsoft-access-eu-data

The same way that EU can force fetching data from the US entity.

Now on the EU side:

GDPR fine of 4% of your worldwide income. Well, too bad, your US entity refused, we will have to punish your EU entity very strongly.

If small provider, oh right you refuse ? Well, we will notify your bank that you do not respect the court orders, etc.

The law is one of the way of enforcement, but there are multiple stages of pressure.

Still refuse ? Well, let's come to you at 6am then.

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/07/10/57...

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#307

Post by convolvatron » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #272

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #47

Can Europe build AI datacenters though? Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs. That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design. Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025: Amazon: $100B Alphabet: $90B Microsoft: $80B Meta: $70B Te…

If they wait a year or so, the new AI chips being used now in China will probably be available for LLM inference in Europe. It seems unfortunate for small and medium size countries, and also for the EU to be dependent on any IT infrastructure only from China or the USA, but perhaps being flexible enough to be able to switch venders or use both is safer?

exactly. in HPC we all understood that it was a tradeoff between money and time, and that the curve was exponential. if you wanted to race ahead of todays capabilities, you could, but you couldn't go very far without burning alot of cash.

because of the investment story about being first and building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the furthest.

we have so much work to do, in infrastructure, and distributed computation models, and programmability, quantization, and information theory...just relax a little. you dont have to compete with OpenAI. OpenAI is just a giant waste of money. take your incremental gains and invest in research and I assure you we can get there without directing our entire economic output into buying the latest highest margin parts from Nvidia only to use them at 30%, if you're being generous.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#308

Post by AtlasBarfed » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

States need to sponsor open source to the tune of tens of billions.

Ss the reg points out it's now national security in a deglobalization world.

I got mocked on this site for suggesting it.

But both the EU and the non aligned superpowers need open source hardware and software stacks.

It's all there already. The people did 90% of the work. Llms are here to close feature gaps, identify security issues, port code. They are great at cloning and iterative improvement.

You don't need some radical new idea. And stand up to American companies

And oh jeez, you might get a functioning tech sector of companies. That would be horrible wouldn't it EU.

Proprietary software and hardware/firmware is a weapon these days. This is a US issue as well.

Open source is the key for the entire economic stack of fabrication of computing devices in a weaponized low trust deglobalized multipolar world.

It enabled cooperation, export, multinational companies to make money worldwide

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#309

Post by 202508042147 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

bborud wrote: post #144

atmosx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.

Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how. I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company do…

+1 for bare metal! I wish I could convince more C level people that that's what we need most of the time.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#310

Post by yobbo » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #75

202508042147 wrote: post #49

As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in d…

>>As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where i…

> because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.

No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.

There are many instant-pay apps across Europe and they are intentionally not interoperable outside of local markets. Each local banking oligopoly is trying to fence off competition. The main fear is from smaller neo-banks.