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.
it’s y.”
Described it pretty well|succinctly the last time I saw it being referenced.
I don't know what you mean by China "getting rid of Microsoft" in the context of cloud providers. I mean, Azure is already present in China's internet, and just like any cloud provider present in China it's presence is a partnership with local cloud providers.
Russia is getting rid of Microsoft not because it has a choice. They are subjected to sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine, and that essentially cut their access to all tech services. By that measuring stick, Russia is also getting rid of Boeing and Airbus.
There's lots of interesting stuff to watch out for.
So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?
If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.
The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.
> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.
> isolationism is a death sentence
The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.
If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.
If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.
If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.
This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.
Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.
Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.
That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.
> more international lawyers
I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.
> isolationism is a death sentence.
The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.
Conflating the president's desire and projecting it onto ordinary people. Most people don't care about this issue, it's the current president who is hellbent on destroying free trade.
One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.
Compatibility protocols are probably the best answer, allow individual countries to develop software they trust to interact with internationally accepted protocols and formats. As you said, good luck getting anyone to agree to anything. If email didn't already exist I don't think it would even be possible to implement today.
I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.
As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.
> The kicker? Fully 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say...
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.
If I may ask, why didn't you choose the cheaper option before? What do you think you're trading off, if anything?
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.
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.
No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.
There are many instant-pay apps across Europe and they are intentionally not interoperable outside of local markets. Each local banking oligopoly is trying to fence off competition. The main fear is from smaller neo-banks.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
What is unclear to me atm, is it possible to rent a car using wero? Also, can I pay online with it?
[1] https://thepaypers.com/payments/news/eu-considers-developing...
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.
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).
Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the same app will work there...
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.
Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve, but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.
Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.
But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.
Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too.
it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark, things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller, nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or Microsoft.
Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:
1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).
2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.
My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.
There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.
I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
It depends on the market they're operating in. Planet scale operations can mean have the site load as fast as possible in every country on the planet, because this is how we make money.
Working within a smaller geography I guess you can "host" your services anywhere in Europe and be pretty snappy.
I could mention the fact that EU based startups don't dream big and this is costing them a lot of revenue from markets they don't wish to operate in because they think Europe is big enough. But we're gonna start a discussion not meant for this thread.
Large companies do that as well
but the resulting 'hyperscaler' systems are built around lockin and loss of sovereignty. rather than bemoan the cost of replicating the US environment, wouldn't it make sense to come with a different spin? maybe one thats not so tightly integrated and siloed? isn't AWS just a mirror the the same US dominance that you're trying to avoid?
for example, despite the amount of snark thrown towards the development of open standards, wouldn't it be really quite useful is there weren't 3-4 hyperscalers with different APIs for the same basic services? couldn't we design an EC2-lite that allowed for real commoditization and competition?
ignoring that, consider the value of rethinking things a little bit so that the important part - easy and incremental access to compute are preserved and all the sleazy business practices aren't.
Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.
For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team, nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at a great price.
P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.
Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive, which is not negligible.
RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these, our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is great.
--
While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have their own DDoS protection[3].
[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business.
Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them.
It's a matter of strategy and of choice.
You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.
Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.
As proven by Huawei, ingenuity can go a great way when friendships go sour.
The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero, even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very very very hard.
But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side. Cost went up at least 25-fold, the development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum (because now everything has to run through some build-system I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around every time). I left the company, but I think the product exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my 4 GB VS could handle...
We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to use computers, just how to operate aws.
I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over other infrastructure). Scaleway right now (you can signup and check it out) offers:
* container registry - build an push your containers there
* ECS/Fargate equivalent - tell it to run N instances of your aforementioned container
* Managed Postgres & Redis with failover/replication
* VPC - put your managed DBs and containers there so they can talk over a private network
* S3-compatible object storage
What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons.
Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django app that they need to run.
If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at multiple providers anyway.
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?
From my point of view, it's more : "Google screwed up their online, instantaneous multi-user tool so bad that Microsoft had the time to pour billions into Office-Online-365-whatever-name and now you have Word & Excel in the browser and Google lost their edge".
Without any knowledge of the matter, just looking from outside, Google had the money and the talent to get there but not the focus and the drive.
Silly example : Coloring a text in "Google Docs": the icon is black and white. You can't make that up. Impossible to find it every time I need it and I am using it for 2 months now. Every little detail is like that, showing lack of care for the users.
I hosted all our stuff in Europe at the last startup. The 2 providers above were much cheaper than our GCP stuff one the free credits ran out. It’ll have been the 4th place I’ve worked where Big Cloud wasn’t the default.
Other decent office suites exist, not to mention not all documents need to be cloud-based.
I find your statement lacks context, otherwise it doesn’t seem rooted in reality.
AJAX did so much heavy lifting here.
You don't need all of that. You can go a long way with the basics, and those are well covered.
WTF would it need to match? It only needs to be as good as Office 97, but online.
I don't think it can - dependence on US digital infrastructure grew at a time where American stability was taken as ground truth.
How can an EU leader sit across the negotiating table from a country that can delete (if not read/alter) all of their data, and a willingness to exercise that access?
Even if Trumpism goes away, to know for a certainty that Americans won't do it again one election cycle seems like it will take a long time to establish.
The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US will actively threaten the existence of some of these companies.
People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are currently struggling for their existence.
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 is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
The difference between us is that I know I'm within 0,1% of people that actually cases about this specific use case.
Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of things.
Proton seems to have stick. It's far less feature full than google doc but I started to receive link to proton doc outside of a immigration context.
Also, I do spreadsheet for a living and my last two job were not providing a office licence ( no need )
I mean, once you have managed SQL, managed k8s, serverless, object storage, private networks, kafka, sqs, sns, glacier, and IaC support, you can already be happy as a startup
This is FUD, 1990s Micro$oft style. I guess nothing particular changed on this front.
Jesus Crist and all the saints!
How bad it was before getting in par with MS then?!
If it is now as bad as MS?
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…)
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 :)
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".
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.
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.
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.
Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
IMO even Americans should take a look at whether they need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I'm American and moved off of Azure last year due to the price and the complexity it encourages.
Reposting my comment from another thread on the same topic a few days ago:
> This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.
Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs.
That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025:
Amazon: $100B
Alphabet: $90B
Microsoft: $80B
Meta: $70B
Tesla: $20B
Deutsche Telekom: $1BDoes 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.
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.
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.
You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.
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.
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.
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.
I think Chomsky would have a lot to say about this and the broad manufacturing of consent taking place across Europe.
You can see this mechanism at work in the USA itself. Microsoft tried to get into the mobil market, but gave up. Google tried to build its own social network, but gave up. All other cloud providers are stuggeling to catch up with AWS.
IMO here in the UK we are good at starting tech startups, we are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to them growing in the UK.
In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc - Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK created, we would be great!
Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our nose off if we look forward 10 years.
This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear more clearly.
1. https://tech.eu/2026/01/20/the-european-commission-launches-...
Talent pool in EU is large but not concentrated like in US. Combine this with every EU country having different rules, and not being able to hire across EU without incirporating in every country you want to hire, it's also challenging to access to the large talent pool.
The EU trusted the US so it made sense to leverage US innovation and leadership.
But "Uncle Sam" is no longer an ally. Or a leader. And its recent innovations are toxic to society and democracy.
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.
I would tend to agree, but to take the other side: This also gives rise to massive wars. You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event.
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.
Clearly shows you have absolutely zero idea about what you are talking about and just take your talking points from people like Elon Musk
However what is mostly practical is to avoid building on their proprietary layers and stick to relatively portable tech. Just treat it like highly flexible servers / generic services provisioned through APIs. It's a battle to stop "cloud experts" from cargo culting "best practices" which invariably involve everything they can find at the extreme end of the proprietary stack.
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.
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.
2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly
3. For healthcare, they already forced you years ago. This led to hosting on Telekom Cloud which runs on OpenStack by Huawei. (EU commision wants to ban Huawei from 5G but it's ok to use their software? 'Is open source and can be inspected' seems largely theoretical given the reality of cybersecurity)
4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent on the US in so many aspects (defense, lng to name two very important ones) that eventually, they would falter if the US wants your data in a specific case anyway
5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around
That said, would be nice to have healthy competition, but after hearing this for 10++ years, it's getting really old. It might have been a good idea not to sleep on the AI trend, but, well...
And don't forget about legislation. If there are new laws that set a limit to egress costs you can say goodbye to the walled garden of cloud empires.
After all, how many cloud services does the average company actually need? Most problems have been figured out by now, so such a project would be less like creating thought-leaders and more like a public infrastructure project. With exception of cutting-edge technologies, the cloud has become a commodity.
As a private citizen given the cold blood murders of US citizens by ICE, it seems EU citizens should really be worried of what such an administration is willing to do and can do to their long time allies.
Buildings full of computers aren't that difficult a problem to solve compared to things like semiconductor manufacturing or energy.
Perhaps the issue is more on the software and architecture side. Getting sucked into weird cloud products that don't translate clean to other premises is perhaps the more difficult aspect of this for larger firms. I've made a very strong point to only use EC2, Route53, S3 and Azure AD. Moving between environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the unit of deployment. Getting out of something like a MSSQL hyper scale instance is simply not possible without switching to a different SQL provider or accepting new operational risks.
If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of that open source project, though.
Could you say a few more words on this - it sounds quite concerning.
Here is the timeline of Huawei's ban and restrictions in the EU and UK:
Phase 1: Initial Restrictions and Voluntary Guidelines (2019–2020) May 2019: The United States places Huawei on a trade blacklist, restricting access to key technologies (Google Android, US chips), which triggers security reviews across Europe.
January 2020: The European Commission launches its "5G Security Toolbox," encouraging EU member states to restrict or exclude "high-risk vendors" (HRV) like Huawei from critical core network infrastructure.
July 2020 (UK): The UK government announces a total ban on buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020, and orders the removal of all existing Huawei 5G gear by 2027.
October 2020 (Sweden): Sweden bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks and orders the removal of existing equipment by January 2025.
Phase 2: Implementation Hurdles (2021–2023) 2021-2022: Many EU nations slow-walk the implementation of the 5G toolbox, with only a small number of countries actively banning Huawei from core networks due to costs and dependence on its technology.
June 2023: EU officials express frustration that only one-third of EU countries have implemented restrictions on high-risk vendors.
Phase 3: Hardening Stance and National Bans (2024–2025) July 2024 (Germany): After years of delays, Germany announces an agreement with major operators to remove Huawei and ZTE critical components from 5G core networks by the end of 2026, and from access/transport networks by 2029.
August 2025 (Spain): Spain cancels a government contract with Telefonica involving Huawei equipment. November 2025 (EU-wide): The European Commission pushes for a binding, mandatory ban, threatening to make the 2020 voluntary guidelines legally required for all member states.
Phase 4: Proposed Mandatory EU-Wide Ban (2026) January 20, 2026: The European Commission unveils a new proposal aimed at forcing EU member states to remove Huawei and ZTE from their networks within three years of adoption.
January 2026: Reports indicate the EU may move to ban Huawei and ZTE from critical infrastructure, including fixed-line and fiber networks, not just 5G. Summary of Key Country Timelines
UK: New equipment banned (Dec 2020), full removal by 2027. Sweden: Full 5G ban, removal by Jan 2025. Germany: Core removal by end of 2026, RAN removal by 2029. EU (General): Proposed 3-year mandatory phase-out starting from 2026
Must say, tech that has held up for all that time, must be doing something right.
So this cloud ride, the possibility of a whole new paradigm in computing could happen before we see EU cloud centricity.
I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed Kubernetes clusters.
It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However, those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware utilization and vendor lock-in.
So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?
I can tell you right away: nothing.
> 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage;
I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies require cloud services for the same reason any other company requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.
> 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent (...)
There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe. NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.
> 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around
You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US also outright disappears people out of the street.
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.
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.
And yes, I've walked the talk, so I can say this.
If professionals like you join European companies it will help grow their business and offer competitive salaries.
I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.
However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.
Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.
And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.
On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.
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.
Ss the reg points out it's now national security in a deglobalization world.
I got mocked on this site for suggesting it.
But both the EU and the non aligned superpowers need open source hardware and software stacks.
It's all there already. The people did 90% of the work. Llms are here to close feature gaps, identify security issues, port code. They are great at cloning and iterative improvement.
You don't need some radical new idea. And stand up to American companies
And oh jeez, you might get a functioning tech sector of companies. That would be horrible wouldn't it EU.
Proprietary software and hardware/firmware is a weapon these days. This is a US issue as well.
Open source is the key for the entire economic stack of fabrication of computing devices in a weaponized low trust deglobalized multipolar world.
It enabled cooperation, export, multinational companies to make money worldwide
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.
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 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.
I think the problem is elsewhere. The real advantage of big cloud players isn't their individual services. It's seamless integration and simplicity. We need a service integration standard for infrastructure that enables:
- Service discovery
- Networking
- Observability
- Configuration
This benefits everyone: EU companies, US startups, enterprises anywhere avoiding vendor lock-in. A standard letting services integrate regardless of who provides them.
Not just container orchestration (Kubernetes), but something working across bare metal, VPS, containers, and remote machines.
Now you demand that these companies should rip out decades of the IT systems they have built up, which form the backbone of their day to day operations and replace them with third rate alternatives, nowhere near in capability, support and coverage?
Yes, I love open source and I wish to see it succeed, but this proposal is suicidal. Even if a superior and less costly alternative did exist (and it does not, just to be clear), just the effort of switching over would ruin these companies.
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.
It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.
But the truth is that Europe does not have the infrastructure and offering to be self sufficient. Even looking at basic things like AWS SES, there is no European offering. Apart from scaleway, there are no competitions for big cloud providers. There are no alternative to office suites.
And I’m not even talking about hardware. What’s the point to build data centers if they run US made hardware.
So, as the saying goes: talk is cheap, show me the software.
1. Ain't nobody got time/care to move out of AWS/azure but we can consider alternatives on new stuff.
2. We moving all to European cloud vendors and gonna mail them to ditch US hardware as well.
The first group is bigger than the second.
One wish to say trump has done damage, but he was voted and he's doing exactly what he said he would do so it's hard to treat this as "it's just trump", it's not, it's Americans treating others like enemies.
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.
> what has destroyed Europe.
Hyperbole much?
I think you completely misunderstand what the EU is, the position of its member states, etc.
It's hard to take any point you tried to make seriously given that.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
Also Hetzner (germany) is super cheap when compared with US hosting providers.
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 lock-in. 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 lock-in 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.
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.
US has their tariffs and last stage capitalism, we have our government enforcement laws.
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.
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).
Also, Europe loves to impose its draconian internet laws on the rest of the world, if mutual respect for sovereignty is what they want, then they can now learn to accept the constraints of another nation’s cloud environment. Sucks doesn’t it?
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.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
If you are in France you may benefit from having your data outside of France unless it's really safe stuff (e.g. a website about your dog) and no user-generated content.
Because, if they seize your server for a case A, and they see evidence for case B, they can charge you for B, C, D, E...
Of course the government, public policy, police and intelligence folks are going to tell you:
"yes yes don't worry, bring your data here, it'll be safer with us. Don't put it in countries like Russia or China where they do not cooperate."
In a few months you will have to give your ID to access Discord, Meta, X, etc, and in September 2026 giving ID will be mandatory to subscribe to VPNs.
(and yes technically these services can't be blocked, but once they'll threaten you or the operators of such services with jail and big fines it will be difficult to resist).
If your server is in Russia or China, well, good luck, so many traps during the procedure that unless it is really important, the French authorities are going to give up.
Russia doesn't care about non-Russian stuff, China the same, if you own a small clone of X for example, you are much safer there, and it is easier to operate.
The only thing is that you have to make more frequent backups, as the things are less reliable there, so you can move somewhere else.
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.
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.
I am working on a high availability postgres self-hosting solution that works with hetzner ,just for the Eu market. Fingers crossed, lots of work ahead.
Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.
Americans are not your enemy, Washington (state), California, Illinois, etc (AKA the states with real economic power and all the tech companies) did not vote for this. We still believe in the rule of law and our friendships with our allies.
Thank you Redditor, you must have forgotten about the Patriot Act and how every President since has only worsened Privacy at home and abroad (we could easily go back to the 60s, and beyond). Remember CableGate, Prism, FISA Courts, or 3 dozen other Privacy violating programs?
Yes it all started with Trumpoldemort, lest we say his name.
There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 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 (excluding the US), 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. The fourth one is Russia.
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?
What did happen?
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.
Scaleway and OVHCloud both provide all of that. The problem is more about marketing and a modern variant of the good old "nobody got fired for buying IBM".