Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

391–400 of 729 posts

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

#391
post #352

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…

AI is as far away from useful and necessary as bitcoin and NFTs were. I'm sure society can survive without it

Strange to say it’s not useful, I personally get a lot of use out of it. It’s mostly replaced search engines for me, which is no small thing.

Agree that society can survive without it though, but seems a weird thing to just claim as useless.

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

#392

what a strange game of chicken, why xan’t amzn, msft, et al just contain their infra within euro borders and call it a day? after all the word multi in multinational does not oblige companies to stop selling in Europe, or?

They do, but the US can still force them to hand over data that's in EU. (This was confirmed by Microsoft France officials.)

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contradictory regulations is one of the symptoms of overregulation. I.e., complying to GDPR means you can’t comply to cybersecurity laws. US has less of those.

All US companies selling to European customers have to comply with GDPR. European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR. It’s all about who your users are. Not where your company is registered.

> European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR.

Usually they do. European company processing personal data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."

Of course if they do not process any personal data then it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within GDPR either).

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solut…

> My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.

I'd say they are incentivized to go with the suite that offers the most compatibility with their clients and partners.

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

#395
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe at the moment it's still in the "spitting on each other" phase. Had Trump actually invaded Greenland* (and likewise if he does so in the future), that's where the Rubicon gets crossed and there's no going back. I kinda do want it to have passed that point, but not as much as I'm glad he TACOed. * There's other metaphorical Rubicons available, this is just the one most in my mind given I live in the EU

Trump and his team repeatedly saying they have no problems using force against Greenland and Canada were the red lines and they have already been crossed.

I want those actions to have been the red line, and wish my representatives to treat it so if they are not yet. It is important to keep separate what I want to be and what is.

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

#396

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…

Offers such as Scaleway should be sufficient "feature-wise" for startups. Even if they don't have feature parity with AWS (I mean AWS is huge) it has, kubernets and serverless deployment options (functions, containers), S3 compatible object storage, managed databases, queues, llm hosted models, terraform provider.

Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.

For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team, nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at a great price.

P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.

Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive, which is not negligible.

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

#397
As an European, I see no point in swapping one dictator for another, or one IT giant for another. What we need is to mandate FLOSS, push for an interconnected Desktop model rather than cloud+mobile, force ISPs to adopt IPv6 with a static global per host, and incentivize domain name purchases while promoting affordable home servers and declarative solutions that are accessible enough to most people so they can deploy their own services independently.

It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need hundreds of services. Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or Openstack today.

> Give me Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers. I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.

> Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.

A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the other hand...

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I follow. It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google users take advantage of many managed services. But saying something is not a cloud provider because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or when you consider that not every AWS user is using more than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud provider only for mor…

> because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird I think for most business stakeholders it's not about the number of services but rather the coverage of business-critical needs. When you have access to Azure Entra, you know that you can cover 90%+ of your auth needs with that service. If you have access to AWS S3, you know that your various storage needs would be possible to cover with that. If a managed P…

I did read the article.

I agree that there is a difference between "wood" and "furniture".

Although maybe a more apt comparison is IKEA vs another furniture store.

With IKEA you have a relatively basic "style". You'd be hard to pressed a 1800 style table, for example, but if you are a student or someone who just wants to live in a new place, it's a pretty solid store to go. However, they give you the pieces (not just basic wood, already pre-made pieces) and you have to put them together.

Other furnitures have a lot more choices in terms of styles and they allow you to just buy stuff without any DIY needed.

Different offerings in the same space (no one in IKEA is asking you to cut wood and make your own chair legs or whatever), both valid.

Furniture metaphores aside, what I'm saying is that there is a subset of users which is completely fine with those services, which are still provided in a self-service, pay-per-use way without the need to have admin rights over the entire platform. That's a cloud provider. A more limited one, sure, but it can still be a cloud provider.

And when it comes to business stakeholders, coverage is important, but so are other concerns, including the ability to move out when needed (which still requires some sensible technical choice, because if you go "all in" you're complicating your exit strategy), or even concerns like the ones mentioned in the OP.

Obviously, each company has its own risk aversion and its own decision making process, and so far market share heavily favors the Big Three even outside of the US, but this doesn't mean alternative options should be dismissed as "not cloud providers" just because they don't provide all those services.

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

#400

what a strange game of chicken, why xan’t amzn, msft, et al just contain their infra within euro borders and call it a day? after all the word multi in multinational does not oblige companies to stop selling in Europe, or?

Because that's not how US law works.
Post reply on HN