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

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

#111
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are a little misled, on purpose, with the term "sovereignty", though. For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty. I think Chomsky would have a lot to say about this and the broad manufacturing of consent taking place across Europe.

And for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You work best when you trust your friends. You balance self reliance, according to your best judgment. It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.

This means exactly nothing in relation to my comment, but that and the bare downvotes are actually a good illustration of my point about manufacturing consent.

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

#112

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…

Well, there is good news on that front [1]. It seems it's being planned.

[1] https://thepaypers.com/payments/news/eu-considers-developing...

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

#113

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…

People tend to fixate about cutting edge technology, but my naïve intuition says the problem in Europe is not in lack of some secret sauce: it is hidden in plain sight lack of energy to run the DC - and worse - lack of long term desire to make the tough choices to get that energy

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a viable MS Office/Google Docs alternative it's all rather performative. If those get blocked the entire bureaucratic machine stops dead. Hell block just excel and entire countries might actually collapse.

Fucking Libre Office!

Yeah if only.

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

#115
post #54
post #2

I kind of share the opinion of the FSF Europe that it is less important where software comes from compared to whether it’s libre, but for cloud hardware I really hope that we manage to create competitive European offerings. Maybe we’re lucky and this European initiative will produce more than five Fraunhofer institutes and a gift to SAP.

We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate and control.

Exactly. People used to think that aws is somehow convenient(partially true) and much cheaper which it absolutely isn't. Hooking on anything trendy and pretending it solve all the issues is tech illness.

For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are now, again, moving away.

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

#116
A much better goal would be to ditch dependence on a single company and become, as much as possible, cloud provider agnostic. Not that I mind giving US big tech grief -- they earned it in spades.

But if you wrestle your technology chains from one evil master, do not willingly give it to another, even if he looks more benevolent today. My 2c.

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

#117

Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper! One of our domains is due for renewal in a couple of months. I'm setting up the transfer to a EU registrar for it next week. This all takes time and it's not the most important thing for the bottom line, but on the long run I'm sure I'll look back and say it was a great investment.

> to a EU registrar

Which one? I've been using DNSimple for so long, been trying to find something equally developer friendly who is based in Europe but haven't had much success. Used to use Gandi before DNSimple but it's obviously down the drain today.

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

#118

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…

Isn't every AI datacenter chip manufacturer critically dependent on EU (ASML)?

Sure but the US isn’t vowing to eliminate all dependencies on EU goods. (Just burning all their good will.)

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

#119

> 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to increase their use of local cloud providers. Oof, the company I work for is proudly telling us we've just migrated from a local provider to Azure, and partnered with Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Glad to know that's not the trend everywhere.

>Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Tell them about the Cloud Act and let those rusty wheels turn a bit. There is no sovereignty when working with a U.S.-based cloud company.

I'm personally very aware of that, and I wish Europeans dropped our collective tech-inferiority complex, but I'm currently a junior at a large corpo and that's not even my business branch; I can't steer it.

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

#120
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So much cheaper to operate and control. Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manag…

But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near you where all that is done for you.

Do not forget that it is also cheaper. Main difference would be scalability which you do not inherently need. Not for ordinary bau.
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