I am very smart.
/s
First is "data sovereignty", which is what the current (data) migrations are all about. As long as the data remains in place where it cannot be suddenly locked away by the US government, people don't care if the CPU was purchased from the US, as the government cannot suddenly disable those (as far as we know at least).
Second is "hardware sovereignty", which is what this article talks about, about the geographical locations where the hardware is designed and built. This is obviously much harder, but also less important at this very moment. That's why you're not seeing people suddenly rushing to fund EU fabs for silicon, there are more important things to focus on right now, with real implications.
The article kind of does everyone a disservice by mixing the two and not clearly separating which ones it's actually talking about. But to be fair, if they did that, then they've wouldn't have been able to publish this whole "Look how they aren't actually sovereign after all" article if they did so, here we are...
If your threat model is clandestine government actors then I think it would be a rather odd decision to host on ANY cloud !
The main risk for most people is being subject to US CLOUD Act, US PATRIOT Act etc. etc. Which, despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies in the fake-EU clouds operated by the US providers.
If you are serious about EU data sovereignty then you absolutely want an EU OpCo that has nothing whatsoever to do with any US company. If OpCo has ties to a US company or IS a US company such as AWS or Microsoft, then you've lost the EU jurisdiction.
TBH, all of these entities are likely actively penetrated by US, Israeli and Russian human assets. You don’t need esoteric knowledge of CPU flaws or whatever if the dude holding the keys works for you.
But they are two different things.
You can’t solve all problems at once.
It’s reasonable to start by solving the problems which provide rrhe best improvement for the lowest effort and risk.
Prioritizing data sovereignty as the OP has done well naming it, seems like a good trade off to me.
AFAIK, there is absolutely zero evidence either Intel or AMD CPUs are compromised, even less so that they're somehow remotely accessible by the US government...
1. Use open-source and Free as in Freedom software
It's always easier to place and hide backdoor into closed source software than open source software.
2. Use decentralized and federated communications networks
Even small organizations, groups should run own servers. Don't concentrate data at few cloud service providers.
This is a sensationalist headline (CBA to RTFA). It isn't a case of all or nothing, it is about becoming less dependent. A country like China follows the same industry, and besides, in a globalist economy like ours we are dependant on each other. So, for example, a lot of hardware components come from China, and assembly happens there as well. That counts for EU (DE, FR, ...), US, CA, RU, UA, CN, IN, etc. But as the talk on 39c3 has shown [1]: we can DIY.
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturi...
This cloud provider is a for profit company, not a research institute, so they can see short term commercial value if they do it
China already produces government and business computers with their homemade LoongArch architecture. The run on homemade Linux as well. Their point was not only to not be worried as much about backdoors and sanctions, but also to get a platform that their own universities and engineers can maintain and develop
This brand used to coproduce with the French, open source and Java apps work, it's under US sanctions for supplying the chinese government and military, export was restricted so that none land in Russia.
It took decades to make, commercial value is uncertain, but they did master the entire computing stack now
https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...
Silicon level backdoors.
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...
There is the NanoIC research line at imec (2nm), CEA-Leti incomming 7nm FD-SOI pilot lines, and in terms of full production lines, Global Foundries Dresden (12 nm), ESMC (12 nm, in construction), and the various FeRAM/FMC projects I can't keep track of (Neumonda for example).
I would be more worried about designs, because outside of ARM (and Imagination Tech, both in the UK), I don't know any competitive European designs. (about routers NXP already makes router chips with accelerators on top of ARM cores, used for example in the Mono Gateway, but they are fabbed on old TSMC nodes)
And as commented elsewhere, ARM
They can't. The EUV light source is produced by Cymer, an American subsidiary of ASML.
https://catalonia.com/w/barcelona-supercomputing-center-laun...
https://www.bsc.es/join-us/excellence-career-opportunities/d...
I think there is a partition in our supercomputing facility for these new types of technologies, but since my work is running climate models, I only hear news from other teams like our AI factory, the quantum computer, or people involved with these new chips and some emulators (that I think work together).
> Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives designed to reduce exposure to US legal reach.
this is just sad. the US clouds did not happen because US poured billions into them. they happened because the financial/whatever situation was such that these businesses could happen.
now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US. not even catching up. getting to where the US clouds are today.
the "skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been" quote comes to mind.
Part of what got Microsoft into this position in the first place is that they built and sold software.
Now, they don't build and sell software, they sell services. Services means you're buying access to data.
The data is the problem.
There's a certain amount of soft power you have when you can disallow access to data and services for foreign officials[0] arbitrarily.
The old world order would of course permit us to sanction new sales of things, but in the new world: this is crucially tied with current access to services.
I think the easiest way to think about it is:
Would you depend on another nation selling you the parts to build a power plant, or would you prefer to depend on them supplying you the power- in fact it's worse than that because not only are you buying power you're also giving up a lot of information on who uses it, how it's used, and enough control to cut it off for an individual person.. totally crazy.
the EU itself was designed around the idea that if you are crucially tied in this way then war becomes unthinkable. But that only works when you're equivalently sized entities. The US uses this position to bully the world.
The biggest share of imports to EU by value is "mineral fuels, oils, distillation products". It's 17% of all imports.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/imports-by-categ...
2) Tech dominance is almost at 100% for large companies and governments across europe. Much higher than 17%
The problem with the right wing authoritarian types, regardless of regime is that their thirst for power is harmful to all stakeholders. The tragedy of the Iraq War wasn’t Iraq — it was kicking off decades of inevitably escalating conflict. And doing so for nothing.
We, as in citizens of the world, need strong trade ties with China, Europe, the United States and the developing world. I don’t want my sons getting killed by some PRC drone, nor do I want them killing people in service of the dreams of fat old men.
Europe butchered two generations a century ago. Their model makes sense, and can integrate with the world.
That's surprising. I would've expected most people at a cybersecurity conference to have heard of it, for over a decade.
Is this conference not for people who understand the technology at all, but rather for purely management-track people who oversee the people who understand the technology?
Even if open source, currently there is no European plan on how to take care of supply chain on those.
Huawei came up with a full stack, after the ties were closed, as an example. OS and languages.
Also it would be great not to depend on that poor fellow in Nebraska to keep it running, and being further developed.
It doesn't matter that it's open source if most contributions and maintenance effort come from MS, Google, Oracle, Red Hat etc. These companies control these projects.
I always snarked at clueless CEOs bent on forcing me to sign NDAs while the entire infra _and_ data was living in US from the get go. Like, what's so sensitive I'm going to disclose that wasn't voluntarily disclosed by yourself already?
I am sure the US government has everything from my banking records to my biometrics to my medical history.
That does not mean I would be ok with all of those things being posted on the open web (yes, some / all may already be).
Employers are generally more concerned with disclosure to competitors than they are with possible collection by US intelligence.
Sovereign clouds are an incredibly meaningful first step. Full independence takes decades. China still uses plenty of AMD and Intel chips, does it mean the amount of independence they've achieved is meaningless? That their stacks are just as dependent on the US as those of the EU?
Of course not and even a child could know that. You start with the very end of the chain and hopefully very gradually work your way upwards. Sovereignty is a float, not a bool. If it's a bool its valye is False for all of China, the US and Italy, where in reality each has very different degrees of tech sovereignty. So you do things in order of efficiency, i.e. compare effort needed and how much it moves the sovereignty needle and pick what has the best ratio at this time. Designing and producing your own processors is far down this list.
No, that's just taking a quick win and kicking the can down the road.
Data migration and hosting is comparatively quick and easy. It can be done any time.
What takes huge lead-times is re-establishing a chip-making industry; not just the fabs but also the raw material contracts, materials processing etc
I'd argue that achieving data sovereignity first is counter-productive because we know the politicians will relax once the easy bit is done. The actual hardware hard-work will never get funded, especially after a new US President takes office in 2029. Europe will sigh in relief and go back to its wilfull ignorance of the risks of dependency'
Please read about the previous initiatives like Cloudwatt involving the same actors (Thales, etc.) [0]
I have been forced to consider them about 10 years ago and realized at the time that the French telco Orange (who acquired it in 2015) just transferred all control to Huawei (datacenters in France but controlled by Huawei). So all the organisations who put their precious data in a sovereign EU cloud was now in the hand of the Chinese. It took me a while to understand because they would hide it first and strangely the wikipedia article does not mention it.
So it was fun while the initial public money was flowing but right after that they just throw their "client" under the train.
If you want an European cloud, companies like Hetzner are good. But please do not get to excited by all the other announcements.
Most of what I see are Kubernetes offerings and VPS
This is laughable, since US cloud platforms invested trillions. Also, US companies benefit from greater efficiency, know how, cheaper energy and less regulations.
If EU wants to compete with the US, they have to do what US does.
1) An ISA licensor, with no capability to create its own CPUs
and
2) Owned by Softbank in Japan, not European
I'd also argue that while Softbank has capital ownership of the company, the leadership structure and how that capital is allocated is still done within the UK with standard board oversight. I know a few of the leadership team personally, and they have a wide remit, almost more so than a public company might do.
You could start running things on ARM, but, almost certainly, that comes with a lot of extra friction. (Not saying that isn't a bad idea, it'd probably improve the ecosystem as a whole and flush out architecture-specific assumptions in server software. But it's not someting trivial to do.)
x86/64 is looking more and more like the next Alpha or MIPS in many ways.
I think this is an important thing to note in all these discussions of "why can't europe innovate": europeans in europe can and do innovate, but the processes to commercialize that innovation have been set up in the US, and have no market incentive to relocate or diversify. They can always take advantage of innovation wherever it lies.
To make the market care about something it is otherwise indifferent to, you have to pay it. Whereas capital markets ordinarily don't care if a company serving europeans is domiciled in the US, if you pay them a couple billion suddenly they will. It may be expensive, but it's the only solution to the problem at hand.
What's your alternative? The US has behemoths with trillions of dollars in market cap, more than GDPs of most countries in EU. What kind of innovation in context of cloud do you think would allow anyone to compete with them? Who would risk their own money and pour billions into challenging them?
Depends on what you mean by this.
Quite often this is said in the direction of eroding labor protections and allowing corporations to fuck over consumers freely.
If that's whay you mean, then no, fuck that noise.
Better to take the China route of enforcing a bunch of stuff to be home grown and making it harder or impossible for US corporations to act here.
17% is the share of money spent on imports by category. The actual energy imports dependency rate is much higher.
"The energy imports dependency rate in the EU was 57%, which means that nearly 60% of the EU’s energy needs were met by net imports. However, the dependency rate varied across EU countries. The highest levels were found in Malta (98%), Luxembourg (91%) and Cyprus (88%), while the lowest dependency was in Estonia (5%), Sweden (27%) and Latvia (29%)."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/w...
I do not know whether it would be technically an act of war, but its certainly practically so.
If the processor is mostly idle or running minimally optimized software, which is most software, then ARM offers better performance per watt. If the processor is running highly optimized code at max throughput all the time then x86 offers better performance per watt.
This is an intrinsic tradeoff. To make low-utilization workloads more power efficient you have to make high-utilization workloads less power efficient and vice versa. ARM and x86 differentiate themselves by taking opposite ends of that tradeoff spectrum.
It depends on the code.
Wait, European you said? Never mind. Only politicians and the very rich deserve money is the law here.
The owners of European clouds are people who were very, very wealthy before they ever started doing cloud (Xavier Niel, the Klaba Family in France, Hetzner (is also a German family name), Deutsche Telecom/Swisscom/A1 Telecom) and none of them have a reputation of decently paying anyone, whether we're talking software developers, system administrators, SREs, security guards, managers, ... and, of those, only Xavier Niel was not swimming in money when he was born (he was still very comfortable at a time when that was not at all common)
As are most politicians. For example, Ursula von der Leyen is a member of a wealthy German family that was part of the aristocracy in Germany. Her family's money survived WW2 in Germany (everyone in Germany and North West Europe knows what that means, and it's nothing good). Her ancestors belonged to the nobility of the Free Imperial city of Bremen, allied to the Holy Roman Empire. Nobody in her family has ever lacked for money for 20 generations.
I've heard of people holding long grudges before but holy shit, that's quite a reach even for HN, that's over 200 years ago! :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leyen
It's a commentary on social mobility.
Oh, and actually her family has been rich for over 400 years for sure, and probably double that.
One thing I always found a big positive on America is that a lot of the "American elite" was born, perhaps not poor, but also not rich, and they are never part of a dynasty that has been rich since the dark ages. Trump's grandfather was at best middle class. Biden's parents were broke when Joe Biden was little. Obama comes from what is probably a broken home. The contrast with Europe is enormous. By contrast, it often looks, in Europe, that the only possible way to become rich is to marry into a rich family.
The concerns are similar to US supplied fighters having the kill switch or remotely damaging centrifuges in Iran using software virus.
No one knows whether CPUs are compromised similar to no one knew beepers with explosives in Lebanon were compromised by Israel, allegedly during manufacturing. CPUs don't need to be accessed remotely, any compromised person locally will be enough.
These are fascinating cases to show how far state actors will go and how long the compromise can stay dormant.
I doubt that they actually do, just cutting off software support substantially cripples the F-35 in multiple ways and without spares they aren't going to fly very long (on the timescales of fighter programs).
The risk isn't worth the payoff because if anyone found that killswitch, US arms sales would crater.
All that said I don't think my country should be buying US systems if European equivalents or near equivalents exist anyway for geopolitical reasons.
This is very different though, first they're huge, expensive machines, requiring infrastructure, maintenance and crew, there are huge surface areas to hide things like kill-switches. With CPU packages, not so much, and also fairly established how exactly you can clear the entire CPU, good luck doing that with the complexity-machines known as fighter jets.
> No one knows whether CPUs are compromised
Right, but what we do know, is that any US company (or any EU subsidiary with US owner, like "AWS European Sovereign Cloud") can and will be used to hold our data hostage when needed by the US government, as proven by recent actions.
So, based on what we know and what we don't know, "data sovereignty" remains a priority, and until proven, "hardware sovereignty" remains less important, for now.
It's impossible to fully eliminate any exposure to US sanctions. If the EU wants to fully shield itself, it should aggressively counter-sanction American entities. If the US government knows that every time it sanctions some EU entity, an American entity will get sanctioned just as hard, it will think twice.
For some reason, the EU has been unwilling to go down this obvious path.
If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down.
Take what happened to the French ICC judge and imagine that happening across a whole country and far more pervasively (because a lot of people he deals with will not follow US sanctions, but would have their own services cut off if his country was sanctioned): https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-t...
You don't think they'd rather maybe find alternatives rather than shutting down? Sure, it'd be sucky probably for a long-time, but it's not like we don't have IT professionals who can stand up physical servers, email servers and what not, plenty of local municipalities do so already, so somewhere there is expertise already.
People generally don't just give up and throw their hands in the air in the face of difficulties, even less so when the governance of their country depends on it.
The EU economy is on par with the US economy. The EU has plenty of ability to hurt the US economy.
The reason this doesn't happen is because the EU isn't a country. It doesn't have a unified central government. It's 27 different sovereign states, each with their own completely different foreign policy. The type of policy I'm describing requires a unified political leadership willing to play for high stakes.
This is why China has been so much more effective than the EU in the trade war with the US. It's not that China theoretically has better cards to play. It just has a central government.
Well, the EU in general tends to favour the "lets sit down in a room and talk like grown-ups" approach to finding solutions to problems.
Wielding sanctions as a first/second choice option is a very US thing, even more so with the present administration.
In theory the EU does have a lot of options available to it beyond sanctions, such as making life difficult getting Schengen visas for all those US citizens you constantly read about on the CNN website who are flocking to Europe .... but that sort of action would be very un-European[1][2]
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-family-relocated-miami-ita... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/central-eastern-europe-americ...
Trashing your own tourism sector is a very European defense mechanism.
The truth is there is one and only one way Europe can try reclaiming sovereignty, and it’s the one that’s most painful—rebuilding its own military.
This isn’t a realistic option without an independent security posture. Washington could bankrupt Europe overnight right now with targeted tourism, technical and financial sanctions. (And increasingly, energy.) All of that before considering kneecapping Europe’s NATO-integrated kit.
Yet again the American exceptionalism bleeds through and shows why the hegemony is currently dying. Maybe with a slight bit of humbleness it could have survived but no, the exceptionalism is so well encoded that it seems short of impossible to stop the decline at this point.
Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too, which based on the current goings, isn't going so well. How do you expect that to be true for the second/third largest economy in the world, when the US can't even do so with Iran, one of the already most sanctioned countries in the world?
None of this requires America be better at anything. It just requires the current finance and trade flows to be what they are.
> Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too
The analogy doesn’t work. American sanctions and adversarialism with Iran have famously granted us few grabholds on their system. Tehran is sovereign.
To the extent there is an analogy here, it’s in European reliance on America being its Hormuz. The obvious vulnerability that gives America asymmetric capability over Europe is the financial, security, energy and trade reliance. Unlike the Hormuz, those aren’t geographic features. But if Brussels is content with mincing around with their own special pile of AMD chips (or tourism bans or whatnot), it might as well be carved into rock.
It's not good to be in denial about this. Even small amounts of US pressure would create chaos in Europe at this point. Multiple European countries are heading towards a major financial crisis entirely on their own, even without any US involvement at all. See e.g. the UK, whose debt is now much too large for even an IMF bailout to work. Only massive austerity of the type that makes 2008 look like splashing around in warm water will be enough to turn that around.
Europe is not independent. Even ignoring basics like oil and gas, the choices of the EU ruling elites in Brussels have, over a period of many years, broken any ability to create a competitive domestic tech industry (something very difficult even with China-style global cutoffs). Even if it was all fixed tomorrow it's far too late. Building a competitive domestic office suite is far beyond what the EU can achieve, let alone everything else required.
Right, I agree, situation is awful and Iran is struggling. But is it bankrupt? Did the US bankrupt much-smaller-than-Europe Iran overnight? Nope, so lets not be under the false belief that somehow Europe would be easier, that's backwards.
While you can acquire these assets the lead times would be several months at a minimum, and probably years if everyone is trying to do it at the same time. It isn't an issue of knowhow, the required physical infrastructure doesn't exist.
Probably the larger cities would take longer to solve, but I don't think "We cannot get server hardware from the US" will be the biggest problem, it'll be around national organization until the biggest fires been put out. Putting one server in each ajuntament would basically be enough to get 80% of the local municipalities up and running again.
EU does run a trade surplus with the USA. In a big fight the USA would, strictly speaking, have to replace more stuff than the EU would. However that ignores the makeup of the things being traded. EU exports to the US is dominated by pharma products that the US could make generics of, misc machinery that can often be replaced by Chinese competitors now, and luxury goods the US doesn't strictly need. US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports).
It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days. There are no home grown replacements for most US software and no ability to make them anytime soon (especially as any broad spectrum sanctions would include frontier AI models).
I think per capita is not a useful measure here? The populations are unequal.
By nominal exchange rates, the US economy is estimated to be $31.856T this year; the EU's $23T; by purchasing power parity exchange rates, the EU is $30.678T.
Exchange rates matter for what actually gets traded, but they're also easily shifted by interest rate policies. But even with this, any simplification of economics sufficient to fit in a comment is going to be very misleading about questions of who is more or less dependent on global free trade, the US or the EU. Even the complexity you list: I suspect there's an office or five in various EU nations filled with economists trying to work out exactly what would go down if there was an EU-US trade war and how to remove the critical points of failure.
> US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports).
> It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days.
Yes, but this is kinda the point of all the digital sovereignty stuff.
It was already weird to me, as an iPhone app developer in Germany making apps for Germans living in Germany where sometimes the only language option was German, that I had to tick a box while uploading apps confirming that any encryption in the app would be in compliance with US export laws*; now, it's unacceptable.
* https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-ap...
(Irony, that page links to https://bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption which for me has an SSL error)
It's true that much of our infrastructure depend on US parties, but there are regions, governments, municipalities and more that is already 100% independent, although they're few right now, growing every day though.
But it's a misconception that it's 100% dependent on US SaaS and services, when already there are islands of people running their own infrastructure already today. People won't just give up if the US somehow cuts all connection, they'll just collaborate with the people who's infrastructure continue running like nothing happened, and it'll happen fast as a lot of services depend on that to work.
What about the devices people use to use this infrastructure? Most individuals use American controlled smartphones and American OSes on computers. What about private businesses?
However:
1. European countries are low growth and therefore of diminishing economic importance. Every year that goes by North America and Asia and other economies become comparatively larger.
2. What the US supplies Europe is going to do greater immediate damage to Europe than what Europe supplies the US. The US can turn off things that start hurting economically broadly and immediately and are hard to replace: cloud services, payment systems, etc. Things that only hurt when stocks run out, or that could be bought from elsewhere have less impact.
Yeah, virtually unheard of in a certain North American country, where every tourist with a certain skin color never been very worried about being extra-judicially sent to an internment camp.
We're mostly dependent on other Europeans, the US is not the single highest tourist/visitor in any of the Southern Europe countries. Italy is the country with the highest percentage of American tourists, but even they have more German visitors. Most southern countries have most tourists from the UK, Germany and France, kind of as expected.
If you think about it for a second that makes a ton of sense too, considering the distances involved here, and how cheap flights inside Europe are.
Please re-read my post .... in particular the first two words "IN THEORY".
As far as I am aware, the option I mentioned has never, ever been mooted as a possibility. It was something I invented as a random example of a non-sanction possibility.
> rebuilding its own military
Aah yes, because a strong military has been so awesome for the US in the US–Iran war where IIRC the Iranians managed to destroy lots of very expensive US military radars[1] and other expensive assets[2][3] in the region despite your president having claimed to have "destroyed 100% of Iran's military capability".
But let's not get in to politics....
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/middleeast/us-air-force-a... [3] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-aws-data-center-uae-iran-b...
It doesn’t work in theory. America reversing the move and banning its own citizens from traveling to Europe would bankrupt multiple EU members [1].
> because a strong military has been so awesome for the US in the US–Iran war
Uh, the Iran war was an exercise of American sovereignty. Rules be damned.
> where IIRC the Iranians managed to destroy lots of very expensive US military radars
And they didn’t do it with soft power!
Europe has a good deal. America guarantees its security. It gives up sovereignty in exchange.
“In theory” discussions about self immolation through tourism bans and money giveaways on strategically-useless “sovereign clouds” are finger paint on turds. Messaging exercises. They afford Europe zero marginal sovereignty vis-à-vis the U.S.
Europe is not going to be sovereign unless it commits to an independent security posture. And the simple truth is that isn’t politically possible right now.
> let's not get in to politics
Exactly.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ europe-tourism-economy-american-tourists-f6112f78
You sit there lecturing me on "in theory" discussions and you come up with that line.
I think you will find many European countries would celebrate yanks being told they can't visit Europe. Nobody will miss the loud Karens who make no effort in relation to the local culture.
It might have escaped your notice but the present US administration has not exactly done much to encourage Europeans to welcome yanks what with threatening to invade a European country and all that.
Get your own house in order before lecturing others.
Oh totally agree. But removing American tourism would require stabilizing policy interventions on the European side. It would not on the American side. That’s why threatening to cut off American tourists to Europe as a mooted retaliation measure is dumb. (I can also absolutely see Brussels doing it instead of any of the hard stuff.)
“In theory” requires it work in theory. I’m pointing out that your proposed “retaliation,” banning American tourists from Europe, hurts Europe more than it does America to the point that it would be a potential (albeit over the top) tactic the U.S. would itself deploy.
> the present US administration has not exactly done much to encourage Europeans to welcome yank
Correct. I agree with the notion of European sovereignty. I’m saying “sovereign cloud” BS is performative nonsense. So long as Europe is dependent on American F-35 parts, LNG and banking rails, Washington has a de facto veto on European policy.
Like, what policy position could Europe take with a sovereign cloud but with the above dependencies that it can’t take today? I’m not thinking of anything. In contrast: if Europe decoupled from American LNG, what geopolitical options open up?
> Get your own house in order before lecturing others
I vote in America and Switzerland. I’m talking about my own houses.
That's because the right wing faction hates Europe. :(
Pretty much exactly a year ago, I was about leave home to go buy something, when the power was cut, garage door didn't open. Fine, jump into a taxi, and both of us notice that seemingly the entire town is without power. Once we arrive at the store in another town, same thing.
Turns out, the entire country had lost power, and would be without power for pretty much the rest of the day, and same thing in neigboring Portugal. We were literally without power, internet and cell-phone service for pretty much the entire day.
Did the entire of society pretty much was put on hold for a day? Yeah, but still we managed to go on with our day. I owed the taxi driver until the next time I saw him, the store accepted the same thing so we could buy some stuff, they noted down everything on paper, and so on.
We did survive, and thanks to humans being humans, we all could pretty much survive even that day.
Loosing Microsoft/Google/AWS would indeed be pretty much on a smaller scale, mostly impacting IT and everything related to IT, which is large swaths, but just like every other problem, it'll be worked around both temporarily and permanently, it's just in human nature to do.
Again, I'm not saying it wouldn't suck, nor that it wouldn't be difficult, but also, it wouldn't take a year before emails are being sent between companies again either.
I think Europe now is far more dependent on IT systems than you think. They are almost as essential as electricity. You found a taxi driver you would see again - how would one get an Uber and when would you meet an Uber driver again? How long can shops keep extending credit?
Its not just losing Azure/Google/AWS. It means losing security updates to smartphones, not being able to use Windows logins for your laptop, not being able to make card or phone payments, possibly not being able to withdraw cash. Without security updates American OSes will become insecure. How long will it take to replace the OS on every smartphone and desktop? What about defence? Will those F35s keep working without IT support? What about medical and hospital systems?
The IT impact is on top of everything else, not the only impact.
Its one thing for things to come to a standstill for one day, but the economic impact of things coming to a standstill for weeks is very different. At best it is an instant deep recession. It will mean running out of essentials, even food as logistics is heavily compromised. Even over 30 years ago the CEO of a logistics company told me that IT was critical to their business - that will only be more true today. You can do stuff on paper but at greatly lowered efficiency.
it might not mean a total collapse of society, but it will mean a huge amount of economic damage, and far more than any combination of European countries (e.g. EEA plus UK) could do to the US.
You can only ever play a card like that once. Afterwards, no one will trust you or use your services again.
The US has had long standing bans on exports of things like encryption. The US banned the export of software with greater than 40 bit key sizes for many years and most people just accepted the security risk (and the implication that the US and others could easily spy on them) including European governments.
There are still controls and notification requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
The difficulty of building an entirely home grown IT ecosystem from scratch is insurmountably huge. Especially as a lot of the people you'd need to do it currently work for US companies and are happy there - in any fight it's not at all clear that the people with the right skills would side with Brussels, which has a long history of treating the tech industry as a cash cow at best and outright antagonistically at worst.