2w ago

Trump tariffs reignite Europe’s push for cloud sovereignty

Thankfully, Europe has loads of homegrown cloud providers. The largest is France’s OVHcloud, which runs the world’s largest data centre by surface area. Others include Finland’s UpCloud, Switzerland’s Exoscale, Germany’s IONOS, and France’s Scaleway (the cloud provider of choice for French AI unicorn Mistral).

Political momentum on this front looks to be building. In a speech yesterday, France’s AI minister, Clara Chappaz, called on the continent to “work as a pack” to take on US “predator” tech firms, particularly in the cloud services sector.

https://archive.ph/03Ihx

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2w ago

Trump tariffs reignite Europe’s push for cloud sovereignty

thenextweb.com /news/trump-tariffs-reignite-push-for-european-sovereign-cloud

BuyFromEU @europe.pub

tfm @europe.pub

2w ago

Trump tariffs reignite Europe’s push for cloud sovereignty

thenextweb.com /news/trump-tariffs-reignite-push-for-european-sovereign-cloud

11 comments

Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs have ruffled feathers across the world
Understatement of the year.
Together, the “big three” account for more than 50% of the continent’s cloud market.
Meaning Europe. This has been a known problem long before Trump 2.0. I hope feathers are now ruffled sufficiently to do something about it. The plans are certainly there.

Hetzner?
- There was some recent cloud infrastructure project that was driven by France and Germany:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia-X
  I don't know whether this is that or some new thing -- the article isn't really clear what this "push" is. If it's that, then I don't think that Hetzner is a member, because searching for "hetzner gaia-x" doesn't turn up anything.
  It was periodically a topic of conversation on /r/Europe.
  It doesn't look like Gaia-X is dead, at any rate, since I do see a news item posted on their web site two weeks ago:
  https://gaia-x.eu/
  So I assume that it continues to be a thing.
  
  Gaia-X is not really a cloud infrastructure project as it doesn't aim to be the next hyperscaler, it's a project that develops new interfaces and standards that can be used by others so that an open and decentralized european cloud infrastructure becomes possible.
  
  Gaia X is basically compromised by AWS and Azure at this point...
- Way too small compared to the other ones mentioned. It's great (and I use it), but they are tiny. I think you already have to contact support for having more than 10 machines or something like that, to give an idea.
  
  I thought Hetzner was the size of OVH. I guess not

The first eu company that creates a solid aws migration tool will see a lot of customers when aws becomes non-compliant or subject to tariffs.
Of course they'll need to provide solid infra to go with it, but the ability to replicate a company's infra for testing would be massive.

Yes this is really important and things will likely get worse France is still most likely to be on top of this, given their emphasis on tech independence

11 comments