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

theregister.com

501–510 of 729 posts

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

#501
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…

>"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"

I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.

As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.

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

#502

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…

People do not realize how dire the current economic situation is. Many of the large traditional businesses are on the verge of becoming unprofitable.

The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US will actively threaten the existence of some of these companies.

People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are currently struggling for their existence.

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

#503

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…

Yes, this is a core issue. Most datacenter investments in Europe come from American big tech. If AI is going to be half as huge as predicted (kind of a big if), then Europe would depend even more on the US for compute. The highest energy prices in the world coupled with conservative investment mentality means Europe is practically out of the AI race.

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

#504
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"like containing Russia"

I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.

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

#505
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.

True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud service. The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us like Russians.

> why Europe should start treating us like Russians.

I don't know, maybe because your president is a dangerous lunatic? I really enjoy these "are we the baddies?" moments.

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

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent. If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production. If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple a…

That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet. The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.

>"nationalized and forced to keep operating."

Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render a whole infra including hardware inoperable.

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

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be a vanguard like the ones in the US. You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.

Thiel recently called Greta Thunberg the anti - christ. Thiel is maybe crazy as Musk. at least he is not an authorative source. Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe: Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden? The start up eco system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.

Zero to 1 was good.

But I generally have a hard time thinking any person's opinion is some sort of fact.

However, it kind of tracks with my understanding.

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over other infrastructure). Scaleway right now (you can signup and check it out) offers: * container registry - build an push your containers there * ECS/Fargate equival…

> What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway. Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons. Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django app that they need to run.

I bet 90% of AWS customers could be served by something like 10% of their services.

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

#510
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet. The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.

>"nationalized and forced to keep operating." Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render a whole infra including hardware inoperable.

It's called us-east-1?
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