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Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu

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Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#41

Post by AndrewDucker »

RandomLensman wrote: post #39
AndrewDucker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it will cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere. If you have 300 froblets per month being shipped to you, and suddenly you have only 200 froblets arriving and you have to spend £5 billion building a froblet factory, then you're both going to be short on froblets and high on expenses at least until the factory is built. And yes, in the long run you'll have built the factory, will be getting a saf…

Investment costs money but why would investments hurt? What hurts is the loss of supply. The money is spent on something and comes (hopefully) with a positive RoI and NPV. And you could borrow to build to reduce own capital outlay. I don't think there was a lot of new energy production was put into place, though.

RoI isn't instant. If it takes you 20 years to build as much supply as you need then you're spending money over that time to try and get back to where you were.

And spending money on one thing means you don't have it for something else. Even if you're borrowing, you can borrow less for other things, unless you want to break your credit score, which would also hurt.

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#42

Post by RandomLensman »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #41
RandomLensman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investment costs money but why would investments hurt? What hurts is the loss of supply. The money is spent on something and comes (hopefully) with a positive RoI and NPV. And you could borrow to build to reduce own capital outlay. I don't think there was a lot of new energy production was put into place, though.

RoI isn't instant. If it takes you 20 years to build as much supply as you need then you're spending money over that time to try and get back to where you were. And spending money on one thing means you don't have it for something else. Even if you're borrowing, you can borrow less for other things, unless you want to break your credit score, which would also hurt.

Your first paragraph is describing the effect of the loss of supply, not the investment.

I don't think Europe was anywhere close to borrowing capacity, so plenty of scope there.

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#43

Post by nradov »

s_dev wrote: post #30
RandomLensman wrote: post #3

Where is the investment coming from (the capital markets union/savings and investment union isn't there so far)? How to make building infrastructure faster? Could some other regulation be removed to aid AI and tech use? Not convinced adding regulation alone will solve things in European tech.

Trump's actions are pushing Europeans towards federalisation as a broader trend. More specifically things like this are happening quietly in the background: https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-inc-maki... This mandates a few things: Countries must do certain things in English to ensure a common language. Simple liquidation for bankruptcies, register once and operate across the EU. Places like Germany…

It's ironic that the EU has adopted English as their primary language now that England is no longer in the EU.

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#45

Post by Vespasian »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #27
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #4

I'm cautiously optimistic. The Cloud and AI Development Act looks especially interesting: --- # Capacity * at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years; * simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres; * improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing; ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensi…

I'm more than cautious too: > ... initiatives that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing across each stage of the value chain, from chips, to infrastructure, to software, cloud and AI, and in synergy with past and ongoing initiatives such as AI Factories and AI Gigafactories Software / Cloud: yes, Europe can try to do something but I doubt it. Although it should be pointed out that the EU has one software compa…

ok how would you recommend to get started? Doing nothing will change nothing.

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#46

Post by whateverboat »

fidotron wrote: post #40
whateverboat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have now sovereign CPUs but we are struggling to get HPC ones. They will be there soon though in 5-6 years. RAM is already possible for Europe to manufacture if they can get the fab. Supply chain remains a question mark for the raw materials. Software stack is almost there. In effect, I would say we are around 60% there. The most important thing actually missing is Fabs. Everything else I see a straightforward pat…

HPC will always be years away. There is a big structural problem in Europe with these sort of initiatives: people receive grants for attacking identified problems; if you actually solve the problem then you have to find a new problem for your next grant, so it's best to not actually solve the problem but claim your next proposal will. Combine that by not actually wanting to reward people properly when problems are so…

I would turn it differently. The grants are awarded but they come with requirements that are impossible to satisfy without severely degrading the quality of the product.

1. Most grants are one-off before the EU moves onto new fields of grants. Therefore, there is no way to build a deep expertise in a field for one particular center.

2. Most procurement are very top-down 1990s manner. This is no way to build infrastructure (by mandate). You need to fund competing proposals and then select good things from each of them. Instead, EU has this propensity to award only one single grant, which means every single big org that will be affected by this grant is on the proposal (probably), which then means that there is no room for opinionated stuff.

3. Most EuroHPC funding is national co-funding based, which means same proposal needs to be submitted 1 + x times where x is the number of countries in the proposal. Due to requirements of EuroHPC, x > 3. So, 4 proposals, 4 negotiation for any single idea. It is such a mess.

This in addition to bureaucracy where there is no dynamism in contract negotiations. There is no flexibility in rules. The EuroHPC and every single govt would be okay with projects failing rather than allowing for a small monetary rule change which allows the project to succeed. (This is not even about getting more money but transferring money from one bucket to another in the same project).

I can go on, but these are structural problems why HPC in Europe stagnates every day.

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#47

Post by clear-octopus »

Vespasian wrote: post #45
TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more than cautious too: > ... initiatives that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing across each stage of the value chain, from chips, to infrastructure, to software, cloud and AI, and in synergy with past and ongoing initiatives such as AI Factories and AI Gigafactories Software / Cloud: yes, Europe can try to do something but I doubt it. Although it should be pointed out that the EU has one software compa…

ok how would you recommend to get started? Doing nothing will change nothing.

[dead]

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#48

Post by general1465 »

cryo32 wrote: post #8
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #4

I'm cautiously optimistic. The Cloud and AI Development Act looks especially interesting: --- # Capacity * at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years; * simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres; * improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing; ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensi…

Based on the Iran war situation I don't think we should be building more datacentres for security. They are easy targets. We should be concentrating on resilience and that means distributing capacity and capability where possible.

You could have written exactly same thing about refineries - from Russian perspective the bigger refinery the bigger target for Ukrainians.

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#49

Post by clear-octopus »

s_dev wrote: post #30
RandomLensman wrote: post #3

Where is the investment coming from (the capital markets union/savings and investment union isn't there so far)? How to make building infrastructure faster? Could some other regulation be removed to aid AI and tech use? Not convinced adding regulation alone will solve things in European tech.

Trump's actions are pushing Europeans towards federalisation as a broader trend. More specifically things like this are happening quietly in the background: https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-inc-maki... This mandates a few things: Countries must do certain things in English to ensure a common language. Simple liquidation for bankruptcies, register once and operate across the EU. Places like Germany…

[dead]

Re: Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy

#50

Post by kvgr »

Vespasian wrote: post #45
TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more than cautious too: > ... initiatives that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing across each stage of the value chain, from chips, to infrastructure, to software, cloud and AI, and in synergy with past and ongoing initiatives such as AI Factories and AI Gigafactories Software / Cloud: yes, Europe can try to do something but I doubt it. Although it should be pointed out that the EU has one software compa…

ok how would you recommend to get started? Doing nothing will change nothing.

Make the work market, business market and everything 90% less complicated across EU. I would actually dictatorially made all work and company laws obsolete. EU company, flat tax 20%, goodbye. One month no reason firing. I just thought about how crazy is the car situation, you move somewhere with your car, for couple months and you SHOULD reregister your car, because of law and insurance, costs money, then you go back and again deregister and it costs money again. Millions of things like this. As if there cant be one EU car register and just insurance flow based on where you reside. Even the residence is different by every counry. Some need you to change “permanent” residence and ID and everything it touches. Some you just say i live here now, here is electricity bill, done. Law harmonization is the stupidest thing. Either make one EU law or do not put nose into it. Every country makes it differently, some even more strict than EU requires for no reason.
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