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 Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering.
There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
>And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't deliver a competing product after years of trying, a fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.
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 Anthropic models?
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 enough to scale.
In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.
That was a good article, I don’t usually read The Register.
Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe!
The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
In the US media there is an ongoing rhetoric that everything in the US is wonderful and everything in the rest of the world is much worse. I am privileged to have travelled widely so I know what a mostly wonderful and friendly world we live in.
I just use a few EU tech products (Hetzner, Proton, Mistral) but they seem good enough to me.
> 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.
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.
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.
We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that we'll manage another migration if need be.
Did the exact same thing for a client who's ops we managed on AWS. I was pretty against ditching RDS and a load balanced setup for hetzners load balancer and 3 instances (2 web, 1 db) but honestly, it's been pretty smooth sailing. The sites faster, and costs dropped massively, saving the client approx €900/mo for a better service.
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?
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.
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 manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.
It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.
A lot of this could be standardized and packaged into a product, a modern take on the 'server appliance.' Unpack some gear, plug it together according to a nice diagram, connect to a management console that feels familiar to anyone who's deployed to the cloud.
First off, servers on someone else's premises are by definition not on-prem; and second, it still leaves you with a lot of the maintenance, management, and documentation overhead that comes with operating infrastructure equipment.
No, most wouldn’t. Too much risk and overhead for most companies to do so… most companies should and do just focus on the business value they add, rather than the underlying physical infra
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.
Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data?
These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.
Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
They are not European. They are French, or Swiss, or Scandinavian, each of those countries who may sooner or later not align anymore with your strategic interests. Countries should only trust themselves for sensitive stuff.
I would say there’s even less chance nowadays to generate a fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud offerings.
Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that we’re able to set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen.
That doesn’t mean that won’t be alternatives to American offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else (Singapore, China, Taiwan…)
> set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen
Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
"You can't do X" is a much different experience from "you can do X, but you need to spend a year and thousands of man-hours of paperwork applying for permission to do it".
In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something, businesses will be up and running in months. In France, if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing something, businesses still have to fight individual departments or local governments that have their own ideas about how they should regulate it.
Sounds like a broad blanket statement, have any specifics about this?
GDPR and cybersecurity laws are designed to be compatible, not mutually exclusive, but I'm sure there are edge-cases. Still, what exact situation did you find yourself in here in order to believe they're mutually exclusive?
I wonder is the GP is referring to the CLOUD Act, as it is true that US companies cannot be compliant with both the GDPR and the CLOUD Act, but it doesn't weaken the case for European tech sovereignty.
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.
> Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years.
None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.
Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report - EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy and overregulation.
Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers.
Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely strange.
Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and they can be even cheaper at times and its something I personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
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.
I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I don't think what you are saying is true.
First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.
The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.
I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.
So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?
This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.
Well I hope you're right, the transitions I've seen proposed were mostly shot down because people refused to learn anything new and due to nebulous certification requirements that Microsoft of course has.
Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
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 different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?
Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log In (white button, blue text). I would rather use cash than an app (and I'm in Belgium, carrying around cash is like herding sheep through coyote territory).
My brother actually was part of deal in talks to have UPI pilots as a project within London as a project within his college and I remember him talking about how UPI (India) is in talks with other European countries too.
With the mother of all deals recently signed between EU and India. I sincerely hope that UPI can have access within EU markets too.
If you ever come to India, you can witness the astronomical rise of UPI. From street vendors to literally everybody now has UPI and it has 0 fees and is really great/one of the best.
As for our brazillian friends, I have heard that pix is great too and I have respect to pix as well plus its open source as well. Both Pix and UPI are really great.
>>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 it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
>> Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
It would but then their non-local alternative could win which they really don't want to happen.
> 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 it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
This already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd and market inertia, that stops companies from switching.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
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 doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.
In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.
Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.
The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.
And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
I know that's not what you really meant, but as an unrelated tangent, modern cars are safer exactly because they're not built like tanks. The car crumpling up event at the smallest of crashes is good, because the more the car crumples, the less any of the impact is transferred to the passengers. It might mean the car is totaled and you need a new one, but that's better than someone in the car being totaled.
Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety. But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your daily experience reliability and economy is more important.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world
Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud.
If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will handle such workload with any of the big european providers.
You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data sovereignty and infrastructure costs.
I worked for a 7M€ MRR company that had maybe a million of users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
This is just my opinion, but there are some services that just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged instance.
There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.
Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its really competitive with the offerings it provides in general and has many offerings.
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:
> That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Both being dependant on ASML, that we're crippling to please our bully, the USA. We probably have more leverage that we want to admit, but that requires a lot of politic will and... planning the economy.
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.
Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side.
If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.
In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.
That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
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
I would also add lack of technical competence at C level. In my previous job, I have dealt with quite a few European CEOs whos only background was an MBA. Unlike the US where a lot of CEOs have a deep technical background...
Of course. One only has to take a look at Microsoft, Apple, or Google, to notice that they're run by CEOs with a "deep" technical background. No MBA whatsoever...
Wow you're so right, you did such a good job asking computer mommy to confirm your priors!
But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative, isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
> documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases
All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties. And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy imports.
Software being built on library repositories also under foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.
Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream sabotage, stuxnet, etc
Also to be honest, suppose EU uses kimi model which is open source. They can literally swap out one word from the provider and move from say American datacenter companies to European.
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China.
I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same?
Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe?
The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser known players positioning themselves in this space -- with managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know some examples.
I want to emphasise that this happened during Trump's first term. That's when most of the groundwork for US/EU split was set, now it's just accelerating.
I think reductionist opinions about the "Free market" and price competition being the only factor are naive. Culture and trust are major components of a project, and cultural sensibilities and development culture can be a part of procurement decisions.
I worked for a company that chose Tresorit over any other option because it gave them Data Sovereignty, E2E encryption, and most important, it was not American.
There is intrinsic value in being "Not made in America" and data sovereignty is a major issue for a lot of organizations. Just as an American company would be concerned about storing their data in China, the rest of the world is/should be concerned about storing their data in the US.
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.
> 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.
It’s something that crops up fairly often and I think most of the time from people who are profoundly misguided or just cannot understand that other people might see things differently. Germany is never going to annex parts of France while the EU is a thing. It’s on purpose. The whole construct is full of feedback mechanisms that make it physically impossible.
So yes, for a French company using Hetzner is a bit more risky than OVH, but not that much, and either of those are much better than Azure or AWS.
The big countries all have projects for national infrastructure for things like defense and taxes. In these cases everything needs to be directly controlled by the state and it makes sense to use a local company. Most of the time that would be companies you’ve never heard of.
For random users in the EU, it does not matter because all big service providers will be following the same regulations.
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.
This! I'm Danish and everything in the government is Microsoft. USA is trying to make a hostile takeover of Greenland, a part of the Danish Kingdom, and meanwhile the parliament is migrating to Azure. I hope someone in the government wakes up soon before it's too late.
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.
> 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.
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.
For most medium sized business or government agencies, the main reason for cloud providers is that you don’t need the in-house skill.
You can replicate most of their offerings for that target group with open source stuff easy enough, but you will need people to maintain that and those are more expensive.
We recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.
The time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster, Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well paying jobs
Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here?
We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?
I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.
Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.
European citizens have the right to shop around. If they choose a cloud provider from a European country with higher data protection than their home country, they can send a message to their own government.
Swiss data protection law is an example of this. An Italian municipality could choose to use Infomaniak or Exoscale and increase their sovereignty and privacy.
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.
In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
And when did Americans vote for the director of FBI? Chair of the Fed? The local judge who can sign a warrant permitting the police to rummage your house?
To really understand how complicated is this matter, put into the mix that before AI in Europe there was no shortage of knowledge to have all our cloud services (to the point that a decent part of key infrastructure software is developed in Europe or mainly by Europeans), social networks, ..., but yet it was never strongly wanted. To reach this point, something is really odd with the current US-EU tensions.
It's called the Cloud Act. If your business wants to keep its production secrets and personal data safe, think again. This has nothing to do with Trump.
Don't fall for the trick of using an AWS EU sovereignty cloud. Amazon is US-based and falls under the Cloud Act. Don't be tricked.
But those do exist and they are generally a lot cheaper; not more expensive.
BTW. it's all hosted in the EU if you use it in the EU. Amazon, Google and Azure have data centers all over Europe and using those is not optional for EU based companies. If that wasn't the case, they'd have no business here. Companies legally have to host in the EU and do business with US cloud providers through EU based subsidiaries (mostly based in Ireland. There's a bit of a murky situation with what level of access US intelligence agencies have exactly to all the data or who copies what where and when. But generally, data isn't supposed to leave the continent unless that's needed/required.
I work in Germany. We currently use Google Cloud. It's cheap and convenient enough. Our spend is only 300 euros/month or so. I could replace it. One of our customers insisted on Telekom Cloud; so we support that as well. I've used Hetzner in the past. There are a few other providers. It's not that big of a deal. But it's not a big/urgent issue for us.
However, Vms, object storage, elastic load balancers, managed databases, etc. are all commodities at this point. You don't need to pay AWS 2-3x for that. They aren't magically any better. They certainly aren't any faster. AWS squeezes hard on those VCPUs.
And there's a lot of exotic stuff that some people use. AWS is offering lots of that. But most of those things are a combination of a bit niche and very pricey and more aimed at enterprises than startups. When it comes to GPU hosting, AI stuff, etc. the premium options that Amazon offers really add up really quickly. I'm sure it's fantastic. But many people I talk to in Europe use alternative/cheaper solutions.
For bread and butter hosting, AWS is just expensive and overrated. Big companies don't seem to care much and are sensitive to big brands and the warm fuzzy feeling they get from expensive consultants telling them what to do. And AWS is very good at vendor locking. That's also why IBM still exists and why companies like Oracle still do a brisk business separating rich clueless enterprises from their cash. Vendor lockin is all they have left at this point But those are at this point the idiot option. AWS is increasingly like that. The times are gone that they are a sane solution for startups. Ten years ago they'd lure you in with "free" hosting for a year and then you'd be hooked for the life time of the startup. But it's not that obvious anymore that is a good choice for cash strapped startups.
Btw. Hetzner now operates in the US. It's a pretty good deal there as well. It's not like you have to give your money to Amazon.
'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (now Microsoft)' has been an important factor around my neck of the woods. A cheaper European alternative would never even make it to the comparison. That is changing now though.
Bingo. And for that to happen the EU must be a competitive market. And that doesn’t happen by strangling innovation with a thousand regulations passed down from Brussels by unelected bureaucrats.
Complete, utter bullshit. There are maybe 4 countries in the world with significantly less dependence on US tech. Out of those 4, one has magnitudes more government interference, another one has even more rules and regulations - including even stricter data privacy laws than GDPR - than the EU, the third has slightly less than the EU but also the lowest local tech % our of the 4, and the last one is Russia.
But sure, it's the rules and regulations that are the problem.
If you have any knowledge on the topic I don't need to name the other three.
Talking software as that's the discussion here, not hardware.
Ah the good old unelected bureaucrat-myth. And then you check and the very (usually right wing) politicians rallying against the bureaucrats voted for this or that regulation themselves.
This poses a fundamental problem for many SaaS providers. How can you guarantee client data aren't sent across the pond when all the app state is held server-side?
The answer is obvious with native apps, where it's standard practice to provide server endpoint details, so client-verified data locality is simple.
I don't really know how this is practically possible in SaaS web apps.
Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid.
There are about 200 countries in this world. 196 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels".
Let's talk about the other 4 then, with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four.
I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth one. The fourth one is Russia.
can't wait for my european incorporated company to run on my european cloud servers so I can run my european language models (which will run inference on european english)
Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means".
There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.
But sadly, it feels like pigs will be singing Handel's Messiah before Europe's leaders get off their fat asses and actually do anything about their problems.
Why should they do something about it? They are not IT people. If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist.
If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that knows how to avoid lock-in.
If China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with politics.
The Europeans have already cooperated with Americans so that each could read each other's citizens' private messaging which would be illegal for the locals.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.
You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.
> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG, yet your life is better and you can afford more.
Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.
Again, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.
While this sounds like great philosophical advice, in practice big salaries do attract employees regardless. If you want to solve the "brain drain to American companies" problem, ignoring the fact that they pay better isn't likely to help.
I'm not comparing European salaries with American ones, I'm comparing salaries paid by American cloud providers IN EUROPE with salaries paid by European cloud providers.
I upvoted you. That’s absolutely true for other roles as well. Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but majority will want to work for more than less money.
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.
If Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to look at thew big picture.
1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7 stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in.
2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap energy. Software is almost "the easy part".
3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the previous model.
4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).
IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse.
Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner.
China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything.
One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons:
1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and
2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.
EU countries are just vassal states of the USA in practice, anyway. If Uncle Sam wants that data, he's getting it, either by asking politely or by taking it. And the EU countries can't and won't retaliate.
Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data. Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them? This article is more political than logical or technical, it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
„Cloud“ ist a lot more than blob storage where encryption can help. As soon as you use a service that sees plain text (eg a database saas) encryption doesn’t save you from the service provider (and by extension foreign government). But as the article points out, data exfiltration is one problem, the other, imo bigger, problem is dependence on a foreign nation for critical infrastructure. The US government can decide to shut down almost all European IT and there is nothing Europe can do about it right now.
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data
It's more about not being subjected to the whims of the US. High dependency on US vendors means high leverage for the US administration (export control, sanction, etc.).
> unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive
I don't think most Europeans want a laissez faire-style "anything goes" market, we want corporations and people to have responsibility for what they do and the effect they have. With a little bit of nuance, some government control and intervention is needed in a healthy society, because we don't want to end up in the same situation the US currently finds itself in.
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data.
The EU governments do not have free access to data in a non-transparent way. That's the main difference between EU and American laws.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
The GDPR lets you store any data in a third country, so long as it's impossible for that country to decrypt the data. E.g. it has to be encrypted before it's transferred.
It just severely limits what you can build, to a degree where it's probably easier to just use a cloud that can be trusted to follow the GDPR.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
Apart from Signal, do you know of an actual US service where things are E2E encrypted, including metadata, that also allows several people working on the same thing at the same time?
> not having the US have access to EU data
It is a great deal about not having US access EU data.
It is also about the US not having the power to cut the EU from essential services.
> This article is more political than logical or technical
Of course this is 100% a political matter (rather than technical). This is not a bad thing. Technical stuff doesn't live in a politic-free vacuum.
> it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
I wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts files on your device before uploading them, that would certainly make me worry less about those services.
I work in energy now, and we host stuff in AWS. So far so normal.
However, with the tubthumping about invading greenland, We see that america is willing to evaporate any system that gets in the way of the sun king's world view. Sure, he says now that "we were never going to invade" but given the way you've all just given up your 1st, 4th, 10th and now 2nd amendment, we're not really that sure.
This means that when the next recession happens and the EU is busy competing, he'll ask "hey we subsidies the EU by getting them to pay for AWS, why don't we turn it off?" I mean that sounds far fetched, but so did unrelated personally controlled federal militia roving around states disappearing US citizens without trial.
tldr: you're damn right its about politics. He threatened to invade an ally, we aint hanging around to find out whats next.
Exactly - it's about availability. If someone with remote access could knock out your business operations, how long would it take to adapt? How much economic cost could that incur, perhaps at a critical time?
IMHO, this is the EU using current events to push for more power and control for itself over member states in many areas, including new areas like defence. Apparently member states and people are fine with that or even driving it... Turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind.
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 Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering.
There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
How about we start creating well optimized software again that doesn't need ridiculous amounts of compute and money?
>And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't deliver a competing product after years of trying, a fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.
The consumers are domestic EU so you don’t really need the reach and availability of the big 3.
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 Anthropic models?
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 enough to scale.
In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.
You can get all of that in the EU via scaleway, Ionos etc. for example.
I don't know what you mean by native access to frontier models. Who has native access to these frontier models?
Theres tons of good cloud providers in the EU.
Name some. Some that match those kinds of services mentioned that people need from AWS.
https://european-alternatives.eu/
Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.
That was a good article, I don’t usually read The Register.
Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe!
The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
In the US media there is an ongoing rhetoric that everything in the US is wonderful and everything in the rest of the world is much worse. I am privileged to have travelled widely so I know what a mostly wonderful and friendly world we live in.
I just use a few EU tech products (Hetzner, Proton, Mistral) but they seem good enough to me.
> 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.
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.
Best would be to research a local one where you live. Support your community while you're at it!
I live in a town with 10K other folks, I feel like I'd know if there was a local DNS registrar here :)
But maybe I should be the change I wanna see!
netim.com has been reliable over the years for me
Can you disclose which European cloud provider you chose?
We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that we'll manage another migration if need be.
Did the exact same thing for a client who's ops we managed on AWS. I was pretty against ditching RDS and a load balanced setup for hetzners load balancer and 3 instances (2 web, 1 db) but honestly, it's been pretty smooth sailing. The sites faster, and costs dropped massively, saving the client approx €900/mo for a better service.
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?
OVH in my case
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.
> 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 manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.
It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.
A lot of this could be standardized and packaged into a product, a modern take on the 'server appliance.' Unpack some gear, plug it together according to a nice diagram, connect to a management console that feels familiar to anyone who's deployed to the cloud.
That's essentially the bet of https://oxide.computer
But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near you where all that is done for you.
First off, servers on someone else's premises are by definition not on-prem; and second, it still leaves you with a lot of the maintenance, management, and documentation overhead that comes with operating infrastructure equipment.
Do not forget that it is also cheaper. Main difference would be scalability which you do not inherently need. Not for ordinary bau.
Most European "cloud" providers sell "wood": https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...
No, most wouldn’t. Too much risk and overhead for most companies to do so… most companies should and do just focus on the business value they add, rather than the underlying physical infra
> We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe.
Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
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.
Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data?
These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.
Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
They are not European. They are French, or Swiss, or Scandinavian, each of those countries who may sooner or later not align anymore with your strategic interests. Countries should only trust themselves for sensitive stuff.
I mean, the Euro-zone is way more interconnected than that..
Why stop at countries? /s
I would say there’s even less chance nowadays to generate a fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud offerings.
Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that we’re able to set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen.
That doesn’t mean that won’t be alternatives to American offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else (Singapore, China, Taiwan…)
> set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen
Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
If the size of state and bureaucratisation are the main issues, one wonders how China got so far :-)
No one wonders that if they have any actual knowledge. Chinese government spending as a % of GDP is much less than say France. :-)
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
Bureaucratisation in the realm of business is much smaller in most relevant ways for most enterprises in China as well.
In what sense is china bureaucratic when it comes to business?
Tax breaks, operations of state owned industry, other incentives etc are guided by five year plans implemented by a party bureaucracy.
"You can't do X" is a much different experience from "you can do X, but you need to spend a year and thousands of man-hours of paperwork applying for permission to do it".
In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something, businesses will be up and running in months. In France, if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing something, businesses still have to fight individual departments or local governments that have their own ideas about how they should regulate it.
Don't confuse bureaucracy for authoritarianism.
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.
Sounds like a broad blanket statement, have any specifics about this?
GDPR and cybersecurity laws are designed to be compatible, not mutually exclusive, but I'm sure there are edge-cases. Still, what exact situation did you find yourself in here in order to believe they're mutually exclusive?
How exactly does GDPR prevent you from complying with cybersecurity laws?
For instance, one of GDPR's 6 lawful bases for processing data is in order to comply with legal obligations.
If you're going to make strong claims like that, the onus really is on you to give specific examples.
I wonder is the GP is referring to the CLOUD Act, as it is true that US companies cannot be compliant with both the GDPR and the CLOUD Act, but it doesn't weaken the case for European tech sovereignty.
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.
> Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years.
None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.
Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report - EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy and overregulation.
I thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked myself though...
Price is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.
Well Hetzner's support's phenomenal too.
Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers.
Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely strange.
Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and they can be even cheaper at times and its something I personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
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.
The dependence on US companies is deep and multifaceted. I don’t think we should attempt nothing until a perfect solution is available.
I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I don't think what you are saying is true.
First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.
The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.
I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.
So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?
This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.
Well I hope you're right, the transitions I've seen proposed were mostly shot down because people refused to learn anything new and due to nebulous certification requirements that Microsoft of course has.
Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
Proton.
Also, Collabora office looks really great too.
Fucking Libre Office!
Yeah if only.
First, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing to become free.
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 different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
Well, there is good news on that front [1]. It seems it's being planned.
[1] https://thepaypers.com/payments/news/eu-considers-developing...
Take a look here: https://wero-wallet.eu/
> yes, I can use an app to pay
So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?
Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log In (white button, blue text). I would rather use cash than an app (and I'm in Belgium, carrying around cash is like herding sheep through coyote territory).
We have UPI in India and it's pretty Robust.
My brother actually was part of deal in talks to have UPI pilots as a project within London as a project within his college and I remember him talking about how UPI (India) is in talks with other European countries too.
With the mother of all deals recently signed between EU and India. I sincerely hope that UPI can have access within EU markets too.
If you ever come to India, you can witness the astronomical rise of UPI. From street vendors to literally everybody now has UPI and it has 0 fees and is really great/one of the best.
As for our brazillian friends, I have heard that pix is great too and I have respect to pix as well plus its open source as well. Both Pix and UPI are really great.
>>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 it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
>> Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
It would but then their non-local alternative could win which they really don't want to happen.
> 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 it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
> How did Visa & Mastercard manage...
I'd bet a combination of:
- Got through before the red tape ramparts were nearly as thick as today
- Ungentle arm-twisting by the US Gov't... at Visa & Mastercard's behest
- Amply greased palms... which can't be traced to Visa or Mastercard. At least not in any jurisdiction which would do anything about it.
This already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd and market inertia, that stops companies from switching.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
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 doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.
In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.
Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.
The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.
And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
The Zastava doesn't have a bunch of superfluous computers that track you, is easy to service, and reliable?
Hm, equating AWS to a 1963 Zastava is pretty demeaning to the Zastava. At least the Zastava was cheap junk, not premium-priced junk.
But that is what people actually want.
I want a 1985 Mercedes that is build like a tank and outlives me.
I know that's not what you really meant, but as an unrelated tangent, modern cars are safer exactly because they're not built like tanks. The car crumpling up event at the smallest of crashes is good, because the more the car crumples, the less any of the impact is transferred to the passengers. It might mean the car is totaled and you need a new one, but that's better than someone in the car being totaled.
Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety. But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your daily experience reliability and economy is more important.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world
Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud.
If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will handle such workload with any of the big european providers.
You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data sovereignty and infrastructure costs.
I worked for a 7M€ MRR company that had maybe a million of users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
I think it’s more about the absolutely stripped model vs the loaded one.
The basic services are more or less the same, but the hyperscalers provide hundreds of services where smaller providers have only ten.
Some of those services are utter crap though..
This is just my opinion, but there are some services that just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged instance.
There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.
Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its really competitive with the offerings it provides in general and has many offerings.
Your point's a little moot.
I promise you, a person buying a vehicle for their business will be looking at ROI rather then smart features.
Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
> Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
Every vain CxO is a flashy fanboi at heart
AWS is overrated junk, got it.
Even if we get the data and an EU cloud we still need chips, operating system, devices.
Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.
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:
For Europe, I get this list:Is there a cutting edge use case for AI that open models can't solve ?
Are there really any customers who are demanding AI and threatening to leave if those AI features are missing in every tech adjacent product ?
I think the make or break situation of integrating cutting edge AI for any business is just the hype and fomo at leadership level.
How much of the stuff that is under control of the US cloud companies has any need for being in an ‘AI’ datacentre?
Does a store of healthcare records need AI? The state portal for renewing passports? The tax administration?
I seemed to be able to use all of these things online before the latest boom in AI came along.
> That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Both being dependant on ASML, that we're crippling to please our bully, the USA. We probably have more leverage that we want to admit, but that requires a lot of politic will and... planning the economy.
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.)
Do Europe need AI datacenters to survive? AI is immature technology that is not yet critical to anything.
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.
Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side.
If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.
In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.
That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
Maybe we don't need that kind of money for things like office software, email, reasonable sized databases, VPS etc.
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
I would also add lack of technical competence at C level. In my previous job, I have dealt with quite a few European CEOs whos only background was an MBA. Unlike the US where a lot of CEOs have a deep technical background...
Of course. One only has to take a look at Microsoft, Apple, or Google, to notice that they're run by CEOs with a "deep" technical background. No MBA whatsoever...
ASML & IMEC are European.
I mean, if after three years all we got is Mistral, it's obvious that EU is out of the current round of AI race.
It might even be a positive thing. If the AI 'bubble' bursts they might end up saving tons of money and can buy idle GPUs at a discount.
Yeah and we could run kimi. Th issue is energy, we should keep building nuclear reactor and renewable to power it.
Aren't Mali GPUs designed in Europe?
Wow you're so right, you did such a good job asking computer mommy to confirm your priors!
But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative, isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
> documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases
All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties. And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy imports.
Software being built on library repositories also under foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.
Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream sabotage, stuxnet, etc
Also to be honest, suppose EU uses kimi model which is open source. They can literally swap out one word from the provider and move from say American datacenter companies to European.
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China.
I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same?
Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe?
The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser known players positioning themselves in this space -- with managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know some examples.
Can any AWS data center really be immune from US national security letters?
No, thanks to the CLOUD Act that was slipped into the spending bill in 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
I want to emphasise that this happened during Trump's first term. That's when most of the groundwork for US/EU split was set, now it's just accelerating.
I think reductionist opinions about the "Free market" and price competition being the only factor are naive. Culture and trust are major components of a project, and cultural sensibilities and development culture can be a part of procurement decisions.
I worked for a company that chose Tresorit over any other option because it gave them Data Sovereignty, E2E encryption, and most important, it was not American.
There is intrinsic value in being "Not made in America" and data sovereignty is a major issue for a lot of organizations. Just as an American company would be concerned about storing their data in China, the rest of the world is/should be concerned about storing their data in the US.
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.
> 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.
It’s something that crops up fairly often and I think most of the time from people who are profoundly misguided or just cannot understand that other people might see things differently. Germany is never going to annex parts of France while the EU is a thing. It’s on purpose. The whole construct is full of feedback mechanisms that make it physically impossible.
So yes, for a French company using Hetzner is a bit more risky than OVH, but not that much, and either of those are much better than Azure or AWS.
The big countries all have projects for national infrastructure for things like defense and taxes. In these cases everything needs to be directly controlled by the state and it makes sense to use a local company. Most of the time that would be companies you’ve never heard of.
For random users in the EU, it does not matter because all big service providers will be following the same regulations.
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.
I’d start with govs. Governments are mostly running Microsoft. Like your and your friends and family’s health, tax, ownership, pension and other data.
This! I'm Danish and everything in the government is Microsoft. USA is trying to make a hostile takeover of Greenland, a part of the Danish Kingdom, and meanwhile the parliament is migrating to Azure. I hope someone in the government wakes up soon before it's too late.
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.
> 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.
For most medium sized business or government agencies, the main reason for cloud providers is that you don’t need the in-house skill.
You can replicate most of their offerings for that target group with open source stuff easy enough, but you will need people to maintain that and those are more expensive.
We recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.
The time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster, Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well paying jobs
Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here?
We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?
I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.
As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...
Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.
> other important aspects
like what?
European citizens have the right to shop around. If they choose a cloud provider from a European country with higher data protection than their home country, they can send a message to their own government.
Swiss data protection law is an example of this. An Italian municipality could choose to use Infomaniak or Exoscale and increase their sovereignty and privacy.
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.
In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
"Unelected EU bureucrats"
Clearly shows you have absolutely zero idea about what you are talking about and just take your talking points from people like Elon Musk
I happen to live in the EU so I may have a slight clue what I'm talking about.
But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democracy worked out for Greece when shit hit the fan.
Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
Do Americans vote for the supreme court or the chair of the fed?
Even that would be wrong. Von der Leyen was strong armed into her position by Merkel and the other heads of states, overruling Timmermans nomination.
And when did Americans vote for the director of FBI? Chair of the Fed? The local judge who can sign a warrant permitting the police to rummage your house?
To really understand how complicated is this matter, put into the mix that before AI in Europe there was no shortage of knowledge to have all our cloud services (to the point that a decent part of key infrastructure software is developed in Europe or mainly by Europeans), social networks, ..., but yet it was never strongly wanted. To reach this point, something is really odd with the current US-EU tensions.
It's called the Cloud Act. If your business wants to keep its production secrets and personal data safe, think again. This has nothing to do with Trump.
Don't fall for the trick of using an AWS EU sovereignty cloud. Amazon is US-based and falls under the Cloud Act. Don't be tricked.
This will happen automatically once an EU native cloud exists with comparable pricing. Get on it. No one will pay 10x to store data in Europe.
France cloud provider scalaway has great prices. In some services they are cheaper then AWS. So I think that devs just need to research a bit more.
Also Hetzner (germany) is super cheap when compared with US hosting providers.
You are missing one of Europes largest hoster: OVH (Originally from FR)
But those do exist and they are generally a lot cheaper; not more expensive.
BTW. it's all hosted in the EU if you use it in the EU. Amazon, Google and Azure have data centers all over Europe and using those is not optional for EU based companies. If that wasn't the case, they'd have no business here. Companies legally have to host in the EU and do business with US cloud providers through EU based subsidiaries (mostly based in Ireland. There's a bit of a murky situation with what level of access US intelligence agencies have exactly to all the data or who copies what where and when. But generally, data isn't supposed to leave the continent unless that's needed/required.
I work in Germany. We currently use Google Cloud. It's cheap and convenient enough. Our spend is only 300 euros/month or so. I could replace it. One of our customers insisted on Telekom Cloud; so we support that as well. I've used Hetzner in the past. There are a few other providers. It's not that big of a deal. But it's not a big/urgent issue for us.
However, Vms, object storage, elastic load balancers, managed databases, etc. are all commodities at this point. You don't need to pay AWS 2-3x for that. They aren't magically any better. They certainly aren't any faster. AWS squeezes hard on those VCPUs.
And there's a lot of exotic stuff that some people use. AWS is offering lots of that. But most of those things are a combination of a bit niche and very pricey and more aimed at enterprises than startups. When it comes to GPU hosting, AI stuff, etc. the premium options that Amazon offers really add up really quickly. I'm sure it's fantastic. But many people I talk to in Europe use alternative/cheaper solutions.
For bread and butter hosting, AWS is just expensive and overrated. Big companies don't seem to care much and are sensitive to big brands and the warm fuzzy feeling they get from expensive consultants telling them what to do. And AWS is very good at vendor locking. That's also why IBM still exists and why companies like Oracle still do a brisk business separating rich clueless enterprises from their cash. Vendor lockin is all they have left at this point But those are at this point the idiot option. AWS is increasingly like that. The times are gone that they are a sane solution for startups. Ten years ago they'd lure you in with "free" hosting for a year and then you'd be hooked for the life time of the startup. But it's not that obvious anymore that is a good choice for cash strapped startups.
Btw. Hetzner now operates in the US. It's a pretty good deal there as well. It's not like you have to give your money to Amazon.
'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (now Microsoft)' has been an important factor around my neck of the woods. A cheaper European alternative would never even make it to the comparison. That is changing now though.
What is the cost of storing data in Europe today?
Depends on the amount of traffic. 4TB with 4TB traffic a month cost roughly 27 Euros am month at Hetzner.
At Hetzner 4 TB storage (S3 compatible) with 4 TB traffic cost 27.32 Euro/Month.
According to AWS calculator the same 4 TB cost 102 Euro/Month with their standard S3 tier.
So I gladly pay 0.3x to store data in Europe, with a European service.
Luckily our friends overseas have shown us the way of dealing with uncompetitive local industries: tariffs.
US services sell your data for additional profit and damp prices. How are you supposed to compete with that?
They certainly will if regulations are part of it.
US has their tariffs and last stage capitalism, we have our government enforcement laws.
Bingo. And for that to happen the EU must be a competitive market. And that doesn’t happen by strangling innovation with a thousand regulations passed down from Brussels by unelected bureaucrats.
Your HN handle is a good fit for your comment
It’s tongue-in-cheek given how AI-bros seem to think human intelligence is no different from the function of an LLM.
At least I’m not hiding behind throwaway accounts.
Complete, utter bullshit. There are maybe 4 countries in the world with significantly less dependence on US tech. Out of those 4, one has magnitudes more government interference, another one has even more rules and regulations - including even stricter data privacy laws than GDPR - than the EU, the third has slightly less than the EU but also the lowest local tech % our of the 4, and the last one is Russia.
But sure, it's the rules and regulations that are the problem.
If you have any knowledge on the topic I don't need to name the other three.
Talking software as that's the discussion here, not hardware.
Ah the good old unelected bureaucrat-myth. And then you check and the very (usually right wing) politicians rallying against the bureaucrats voted for this or that regulation themselves.
This poses a fundamental problem for many SaaS providers. How can you guarantee client data aren't sent across the pond when all the app state is held server-side?
The answer is obvious with native apps, where it's standard practice to provide server endpoint details, so client-verified data locality is simple.
I don't really know how this is practically possible in SaaS web apps.
Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid.
There are about 200 countries in this world. 196 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels".
Let's talk about the other 4 then, with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four.
I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth one. The fourth one is Russia.
I played this in my head a few times and don’t get it.
I assume we are talking
- China - maybe South Korea? - US (or is US not one of the 4?) - Russia (ok this is explicit)
I think there might be an interesting idea in here but there is some confusion that’s stopping it coming out
Can someone enlighten me?
can't wait for my european incorporated company to run on my european cloud servers so I can run my european language models (which will run inference on european english)
Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means".
There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.
Yes, nice, true.
But sadly, it feels like pigs will be singing Handel's Messiah before Europe's leaders get off their fat asses and actually do anything about their problems.
Why should they do something about it? They are not IT people. If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist.
If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that knows how to avoid lock-in.
> The are not IT people.
They are not farmers - but it's their job to make sure that their countries have secure supplies of safe food, long-term.
They are not electricians - but it's their job to make sure that their countries have...
They are not soldiers - but it's their job to make sure...
The are not ...
...
(Yes, I suspect that we have rather different concepts of the role of gov't, and the responsibilities of gov't leaders.)
If China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with politics.
And move to the Lidl cloud?
I see this differently.
For European citizens and companies the safest option will always be to have their data in the USA or anywhere where European rulers cannot touch it.
The same for Americans, their data should be safest far away from their government.
The Europeans have already cooperated with Americans so that each could read each other's citizens' private messaging which would be illegal for the locals.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.
You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.
> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG, yet your life is better and you can afford more.
Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Again, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.
While this sounds like great philosophical advice, in practice big salaries do attract employees regardless. If you want to solve the "brain drain to American companies" problem, ignoring the fact that they pay better isn't likely to help.
I'm not comparing European salaries with American ones, I'm comparing salaries paid by American cloud providers IN EUROPE with salaries paid by European cloud providers.
I upvoted you. That’s absolutely true for other roles as well. Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but majority will want to work for more than less money.
There's always money to be made from being a traitor. Maybe next time Yandex Cloud or Aramco Cloud offers you 50% more and off you go.
And yes, I've walked the talk, so I can say this.
Be the change you wish to see.
If professionals like you join European companies it will help grow their business and offer competitive salaries.
~30% salary cut isn't a change many people wish to see.
There's a reason gambling companies end up paying more than market rates for the same roles, and it's not out of generosity.
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.
If Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to look at thew big picture.
1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7 stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in.
2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap energy. Software is almost "the easy part".
3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the previous model.
4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).
Sadly the EU leadership is a bunch of professional bureaucrats living in a comfy bubble completely disconnected with the people or reality.
As opposed to.. the harsh realities of the Bay Area tech scene?
IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse.
Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner.
China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything.
One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons:
1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and
2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.
EU countries are just vassal states of the USA in practice, anyway. If Uncle Sam wants that data, he's getting it, either by asking politely or by taking it. And the EU countries can't and won't retaliate.
Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data. Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them? This article is more political than logical or technical, it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
„Cloud“ ist a lot more than blob storage where encryption can help. As soon as you use a service that sees plain text (eg a database saas) encryption doesn’t save you from the service provider (and by extension foreign government). But as the article points out, data exfiltration is one problem, the other, imo bigger, problem is dependence on a foreign nation for critical infrastructure. The US government can decide to shut down almost all European IT and there is nothing Europe can do about it right now.
It is also about not having the US government cutting people off from their data on a whim, such as happened to the International Criminal Court.
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data
It's more about not being subjected to the whims of the US. High dependency on US vendors means high leverage for the US administration (export control, sanction, etc.).
> unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive
I don't think most Europeans want a laissez faire-style "anything goes" market, we want corporations and people to have responsibility for what they do and the effect they have. With a little bit of nuance, some government control and intervention is needed in a healthy society, because we don't want to end up in the same situation the US currently finds itself in.
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data.
The EU governments do not have free access to data in a non-transparent way. That's the main difference between EU and American laws.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
The GDPR lets you store any data in a third country, so long as it's impossible for that country to decrypt the data. E.g. it has to be encrypted before it's transferred.
It just severely limits what you can build, to a degree where it's probably easier to just use a cloud that can be trusted to follow the GDPR.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
Apart from Signal, do you know of an actual US service where things are E2E encrypted, including metadata, that also allows several people working on the same thing at the same time?
> not having the US have access to EU data
It is a great deal about not having US access EU data.
It is also about the US not having the power to cut the EU from essential services.
> This article is more political than logical or technical
Of course this is 100% a political matter (rather than technical). This is not a bad thing. Technical stuff doesn't live in a politic-free vacuum.
> it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
And this stance too.
I wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts files on your device before uploading them, that would certainly make me worry less about those services.
https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator
Isn’t what Cryptomator stand for ? Am I missing something here ?
How about the metadata?
Its past political.
I work in energy now, and we host stuff in AWS. So far so normal.
However, with the tubthumping about invading greenland, We see that america is willing to evaporate any system that gets in the way of the sun king's world view. Sure, he says now that "we were never going to invade" but given the way you've all just given up your 1st, 4th, 10th and now 2nd amendment, we're not really that sure.
This means that when the next recession happens and the EU is busy competing, he'll ask "hey we subsidies the EU by getting them to pay for AWS, why don't we turn it off?" I mean that sounds far fetched, but so did unrelated personally controlled federal militia roving around states disappearing US citizens without trial.
tldr: you're damn right its about politics. He threatened to invade an ally, we aint hanging around to find out whats next.
Also to your point: "can't we just encrypt it?"
Its someone else's computer. The TPM is controlled by someone else. You can't really process on a machine that has a compromised urandom/TPM
Also the bigger issue is having all your access revoked over night. Thats the bigger fear.
> You can't really process on a machine that has a compromised urandom/TPM
Naive question: does zero knowledge proof solutions help with this?
Exactly - it's about availability. If someone with remote access could knock out your business operations, how long would it take to adapt? How much economic cost could that incur, perhaps at a critical time?
They mean google docs/gmail or office365.
IMHO, this is the EU using current events to push for more power and control for itself over member states in many areas, including new areas like defence. Apparently member states and people are fine with that or even driving it... Turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind.