: IT leaders in region eyeing American hyperscalers escape hatch
Amid the economic uncertainty of Trump 2.0, dependence on American tech has become a growing concern for many businesses, and a survey of 1,000 IT leaders claims that data sovereignty is now one of the most pressing issues.
This comes from research carried out by Civo, a UK-based cloud operator which undoubtedly has skin in the game, having campaigned against what it sees as unfair practices by the hyperscalers for some time.
Nevertheless, the figures making for interesting reading in the context of the Trump tariff war the US is waging against much of the world – except perhaps Russia.
The "The Digital Sovereignty Revolution" survey found 84 percent of UK IT leaders are now concerned that geopolitical developments could threaten their ability to access and control their data, and 61 percent of organizations say sovereignty is a strategic priority.
This doesn't just apply to themselves; according to Civo, 60 percent of respondents believe the British government should stop procuring cloud services from US companies in the wake of the tariffs imposed on UK imports by Trump.
When it does come to their own organizations, though, nearly half (45 percent) of the 1,000 techies polled indicated they are actively considering repatriating data from the big hyperscaler platforms, and 37 percent said they are concerned the US government could sequester their data, a concern which is naturally greater among those working in sectors with strict regulatory obligations.
(They are right to be concerned: the US CLOUD Act allows law enforcement agencies in America to demand access to data held by any US company, even if that data is stored on servers located in other countries.)
Only 35 percent of organizations claimed to have full visibility into where their data is stored and processed, while 82 percent would consider switching from the big US tech firms in order to gain more control over data location and governance – the latter no doubt music to Civo's ears.
"These results will be no surprise to anyone with their ear to the ground in the industry," chief exec Mark Boost said in a statement.
"People are more alert than ever to just how valuable their data is, and it's been astonishing how quickly cloud repatriation and sovereignty have become leading strategic considerations for IT leaders," he claimed.
"It's time for the UK to match the energy of European sovereignty initiatives like EuroStack to help reduce reliance on hyperscale providers whilst still encouraging transatlantic collaboration," Boost added.
Some of the hyperscalers appear to have taken heed: Microsoft recently pledged greater privacy safeguards for customers, and said it is prepared to fight the US government in court to protect European customer data, while Google updated its sovereign cloud portfolio.
But if seasoned market watchers can be believed, those hoping to make the switch from one of the big hyperscalers to a local cloud may find the process is more difficult than they expect.
"Most regional cloud providers are not on par with global hyperscalers in both execution and vision. Therefore, completely eliminating dependency on global cloud hyperscalers without losing significant functionalities is, at present, nearly impossible," Gartner advisory director Joe Rogus said.
Meanwhile, for those looking to attempt it, a separate survey by HostingAdvice.com asked 500 IT leaders to rank cloud operators by how flexible they are when it comes to making the shift to another provider.
Of the big hyperscale firms, Google was ranked the most accommodating, followed by Azure and AWS, with Oracle Cloud the least flexible. Perhaps pertinent advice on which cloud to choose if you want to have a smoother exit in future. ®
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Comments
By LaurensBER 2025-06-028:056 reply Can confirm, there's increasing pressure from legal and compliance to map the risk and look into alternatives.
For the cloud this is somewhat doable (we could run on Hetzner if we increased the team size) but for Microsoft/Apple there are zero alternative ofcourse so sofar it hasn't proceeded beyond a few risk_mapping.xls files.
By adamcharnock 2025-06-028:26 Hi Laurens. Not sure if this interests you, but this is something my company [1] specialises in. You don't need to grow your team, we handle the migration, and also include ongoing DevOps support. Plus your company can still remain in control of the infra. You can reach me directly at adam@...
[1] lithus.eu
/pitch
By sam_lowry_ 2025-06-028:112 reply From my sources at AWS I hear that pretty much all cloud migrations for EU institutions were lift-and-shift.
So I guess you just don't have enough pressure to execute the down-to-earth migrations.
The engineering culture in DIGIT is abysmal and outside of it, totally inexistent. This can also explain the lack of progress.
By dvfjsdhgfv 2025-06-028:411 reply > From my sources at AWS I hear that pretty much all cloud migrations for EU institutions were lift-and-shift.
This is in line with my experience, too. When asked why, they would usually mention 2 arguments: 1) additional work for not much extra value, 2) vendor lock-in.
By sam_lowry_ 2025-06-029:04 I am not affiliated with EU institutions, but followed their IT evolution for a while.
Some 20+ years ago, their IT was fragmented but decent, pretty much on par with the private sector.
But then DIGIT started the centralization efforts, and it squeezed life out of internal IT departments across institutions and directorates.
DIGIT bought all of its Microsoft software from British crooks that defrauded the Post Office and were at the origin of the Horizon scandal .
DIGIT created the infamous framework contracts system that still siphons funds to Greek and Italian mafia.
DIGIT caught on Drupal quite early but managed to suck the soul of every Drupal developer that joined in.
Once in a while the arrogance and ignorance of DIGIT management let beautiful things flourish under the carpet. For many years the EU tender system was the only big website that used XSLT for its original purpose of rendering XML into HTML on websites.
What I am trying to say is that DIGIT has to be reformed and given clear operational instructions, e.g. no more cloud migrations and a 10-year period with checkpoints to bring everything back to earth.
They should also decentralize and nourish proximity IT services.
Also people responsible for money laundering, e.g. the individuals who signed the Fujitsu framework agreement or the European Dynamics framework agreement should be prosecuted.
They may claim these agreements were legal, but let the courts decide.
By StefanBatory 2025-06-029:091 reply Sorry to ask, but what is DIGIT? I did try to Google it, but nothing useful came up.
By StefanBatory 2025-06-029:39 Thank you, I... didn't connect the dots. Both embarrassing and thank you
last I checked the current working version is risk_mapping_v8_sharepoint_bacckup_v4_draft.xls
By bravesoul2 2025-06-028:37 In //startrooper09/company/sales/notsales/old/backup/financial/derek2023
By raverbashing 2025-06-028:49 What kind of Apple cloud infra are people using?
By mytailorisrich 2025-06-028:36 [flagged]
By casenmgreen 2025-06-028:451 reply I looked for personal use at Hetzner.
No spaces allowed in passwords.
Not a great first impression.
By victorbjorklund 2025-06-028:524 reply Why do you need spaces in the password? Honestly never ever thought about using spaces in the password.
Why would they disallow it? It’s just a character like everything else.
By ManBeardPc 2025-06-0210:16 UX. People accidentally adding whitespace by copy&pasting it. Easy to overlook and probably lead to some customers being confused. Also people use whitespace to separate words in text. Most password managers don't generate passwords with whitespace by default.
By fallingknife 2025-06-029:01 Disallowed characters like that give the impression that plaintext passwords are being stored.
By Semaphor 2025-06-029:58 Besides what others said: Passphrases like the famous "correct horse battery staple" https://xkcd.com/936/
By illiac786 2025-06-0219:32 I think the better question is, are they the only ones not taking passwords?
EU businesses aren't going to switch to EU providers as long as US providers are just as convenient and provide better services. EU providers aren't going to be as convenient and as good as US providers unless they can have similar levels of investment. They aren't going to get similar levels of investment as long as US providers are available and convenient.
The IT stuff is a replication effort and replication makes sense only when the original isn't available. Russia and China got some good IT stuff only when the US stuff were restricted one way or another.
So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations.
> So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations.
I think you underestimate the deterioration that's already occurred. These conversations are already happening. It will take a decade at least, but it's already begun.
By StefanBatory 2025-06-029:10 But EU might pull apart itself first.
We in Poland just elected a very pro-America, anti-EU president. By like 51 - 49, so very close, but still...
I'm aware of the state but it's not bad enough. It will be bad enough only when access to US services is just as restricted as in Russia and China.
Currently there aren't any restrictions, the political class is worried and people don't feel good about the maker of the products but that's it.
Why would anybody invest in European mass appeal e-mail provider when things can just improve if Trump changes his pills? As a result in Europe you can't have a Gmail but instead you get Proton Mail. This is cool but its a niche product.
The same goes for everything, EU does have some great niche tech and some content studios but the platforms are always US based. I.e. one of the hottest games at this moment(clair obscur expedition 33) in the world is French made but it is primarily published on US platforms.
On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more.
Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets. Trump for some reason tries hard to change that but he hasn't succeeded yet but on the other hand he just started... So maybe in a few years it can happen after some huge scandal that justifies drastic changes. For example, it can be something like coordinated attack on Europeans by US tech giants and Russia etc. Musk with his actions in Ukraine propelled British and French satellite providers for example.
> Currently there aren't any restrictions, the political class is worried and people don't feel good about the maker of the products but that's it.
There very clearly is the restriction, upheld by courts again and again, that EU personal data cannot be processed on US clouds, including EU-based but US-owned clouds thanks to the US CLOUD ACT.
The political class and EU governments as a whole have kicked this can down the road several times, first with Safe Harbor, then Privacy Shield, and now the EU–US Data Privacy Framework which will inevitably fall.
> Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets.
This is just, well, untrue. Despite the oft-repeated claims to the contrary, the EU is an industrial and technological powerhouse.
What it doesn't have are US oligopolies, which are currently destroying the fabric of US society while being enormously profitable. That's a feature of the EU, not a bug.
> On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more.
Wealth inequality is a failure of US society, not a goal.
By wolvesechoes 2025-06-0211:471 reply > Wealth inequality is a failure of US society, not a goal.
And moral victory is a poor substitute of the real victory.
With respect, having lived across both continents, Europe is winning the real victory (as well as obviously the moral victory in as far as outcomes for its own citizens).
The United States is a cruel, dystopian nightmare of a market masquerading as a country. No amount of corporate success will save it from it's inevitable collapse as the working class awaken to their situation.
By wolvesechoes 2025-06-0312:571 reply Yes, I am all for social democracy, but to have welfare you need to build it. Europe had a nice time living on the dividend from the wealth it gathered in the past, and the fact that US provided military protection. Society becomes older, and US is withdrawing, so that model is no longer viable.
To win you need to have strength. And to build your strength you need to work quite hard. Nothing comes free in this world. I would prefer that Europe sacrifices some of its comfort and survives because of it, instead of dying out with a claim to moral victory.
Europe works hard. Europe is not decaying, not like the United States at least. You lack the introspection to see that.
Europe is strong, stronger than the United States in its core institutions. You also lack the introspection to see that.
It is the United States that is at risk of losing its sovereignty, its wealth, and it's power. Again, you lack the introspection to see that too.
By wolvesechoes 2025-06-0314:56 Quite hard to use the power of introspection in such context, for I am not a continent.
Forgive me for being skeptical, but socialists have been predicting the collapse of the United States due to the working class awakening for over a century.
I'm not going to hold my breath.
That's a fair enough perspective, but your alternative future is an enduring oligarchy, so you should be hoping for collapse.
By Aloisius 2025-06-0222:48 Thanks but no thanks. If history is any guide, citizens almost always end up in far worse shape in actual dystopian nightmares when states collapse.
I'll happily take stability living under an "oligarchy" with relatively weak and divided oligarchs, in a country with free elections that can still effect change, even if it happens at a glacial pace.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0213:292 reply > Europe is winning the real victory (as well as obviously the moral victory in as far as outcomes for its own citizens)
If only Europeans could pay their mortgages and bills with morals instead of money. If only Russia could be defeated by morals and not weapons. If only the pensions and welfare Europeans enjoy could be funded my morals and not by economic growth.
As usual, people who keep scoffing at economic growth saying "money doesn't matter" are those living in a bubble where they already have more than enough money and never experienced massive economic decline and take the economic prosperity they had for granted.
Ask Greece or Eastern European countries how they feel about winning economically.
Eastern European countries are surprisingly nice actually. Those are safe, free, have access to good food and anyone who is living in those is living because they choose to.
The only ones that complain are those who want to have the cake and eat it too. In general, the life in those countries is quite relaxed just as the working conditions. You may see thing like working hours are long but those working hours are not comparable to the working hours in Germany or France for example.
Mortgage default rates or inability to pay the bills is also not that bad. Those who actually have trouble can seek better lives in the western Europe and many do and for quite many the good life is actually in Eastern Europe even if they would complain often.
It's not like those countries lack some resource or something making them poor, it's their expectations. In fact, Eastern Europe has quite a favorable geography with nice climate, access to water and plenty of sunshine. It's such a nice location that those countries receive considerable amount of tourists.
For those who are more ambitious, Eastern Europe offers everything they need - including powerful passports that let them go to the rich parts of the world hassle free.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0214:57 That nice, but I'm not sure what does it have to do with the point I was trying to make? Did I say anywhere Eastern Europe sucks? My point was that Eastern Europe is now prosperous precisely because after the fall of communism it prioritized getting wealthy and making money first, which is what my parent was scoffing at, which led me to believe he must be form a country who's prosperity was built much earlier in the distant past and he forgot what life without economic prosperity looks like, but Greeks or Eastern Europeans still remember. His attitude felt incredibly hypocritical.
Prosperity comes from wealth. You can have a lack of prosperity even with wealth, but you can't have prosperity without wealth.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0216:252 reply [flagged]
> What incentive people have to work harder than average to innovate if there's no measurable reward at the end and you end with the same QoL as people doing the bare minimum?
The quality of life at all social levels is higher in the EU than the US. This can't be measured in dollars, but is clear across all other HDI metrics.
> Asia and the US ate half of the EU's pie of the global GDP in the last 20 years and it's only gonna get worse from here.
This is because of global wealth redistribution and is a good thing. Rich Europeans extracting wealth from the global poor was (and is) a bad outcome. The same will happen to the US, and again it's a good thing.
> Then why does it need NATO bases of the US on its turf, if it's so strong by itself?
I think the real question is why does the US need bases around the world?
> Secondly, even if you consider it as one, all of EU militaries combined can't hold a candle to US military in terms of tech and logistical capabilities and sheer numbers.
The EU members are individually and combined no longer able to field expeditionary armies. This is a good thing, as the former colonial powers didn't use them wisely in the past. However, there is no military power globally who can threaten the integrity of the EU militarily, not even the US.
The US military is a source of endless death and destruction in the world. It's not something you should be proud of. The current forever wars and the unbroken chain of foreign invasions are a series of crimes against humanity.
> Ah, so no augments, just insults. OK buddy, thanks for the red flag, I'm out of this discussion.
I think you may fail to see the irony in this comment?
By eyesofgod 2025-06-0216:27 [flagged]
By mytailorisrich 2025-06-029:481 reply > here very clearly is the restriction, upheld by courts again and again, that EU personal data cannot be processed on US clouds, including EU-based but US-owned clouds thanks to the US CLOUD ACT.
Have they? As far as I am aware there's been a lot of handwaving and possibly FUD but nothing more.
Then you're not paying attention, as there is concrete precedence, in particular Schrems 2.
By mytailorisrich 2025-06-0212:551 reply Schrems 2 does not do what you claim: the EU-US Privacy Shield is about sending EU data to the US, not about US companies keeping data in the EU. So I still don't know what "precedent" there might be.
Surely if your claim was factual, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc would have ceased business in the EU...
You should read Schrems 2, specifically paragraphs 179 onwards, which set the now unchallenged precedent that data which remains in the EU but is subject to US legislation that allows access by US public authorities constitutes a transfer.
> Surely if your claim was factual, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc would have ceased business in the EU...
The legal cover is now the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which allows these transfers subject to self certification. This is already under challenge and inevitably will fall judicial review in the next few years.
Once all the delaying tactics have been dealt with, we'll be left with the inevitable conclusion. Data transfers to the US or US controlled companies are unlawful as long as the CLOUD Act and similar are in force.
It's simply unreconcilable with the ECHR Right To Privacy and GDPR.
By mytailorisrich 2025-06-0216:251 reply > which set the now unchallenged precedent that data which remains in the EU but is subject to US legislation that allows access by US public authorities constitutes a transfer.
Not at all. Again, this is only about privacy shield and actual transfers to the US.
> It's simply unreconcilable with the ECHR Right To Privacy and GDPR.
That's the FUD I was talking about considering that this is exactly the same situation as access by EU-based law enforcement.
EU is playing politics and is tangling itself in unworkable legislation.
By closewith 2025-06-0217:20 > Not at all. Again, this is only about privacy shield and actual transfers to the US.
You are wrong on this. The CJEU ruled that making EU data “available” to an entity in a third country is a transfer, and the European Data Protection Board subsequently clarified that remote access from a third country triggers the GDPR transfer rules.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0220:221 reply >What it doesn't have are US oligopolies, which are currently destroying the fabric of US society while being enormously profitable.
Those oligopolies you claim are "destroying the fabric of US society" are also providing tones of skilled jobs in the US, pouring billions in research (how much FOSS is developed at FAANGs?), and are a vital source of US soft and hard power, while also building a cloud for the German military[1][2] because EU tech industry is far so behind no EU company can replicate what Google can do here at their scale. It's not FAANG's fault there are problems in the US society, that's a failure of US politicians.
And there will always be oligopolies, always have been, better they be on your side that on your adversaries' side. If you cripple your companies to "destroy oligopolies" like your cheer the EU for, then China's state propped oligopolies will gladly step in to fill the vacuum and put your industries out of business. Morality and shaming others for not following your values never wins, power wins. That's Realpolitik. Crazy people still don't get it.
> That's a feature of the EU, not a bug.
It's a feature to have a stagnating economy of archaic companies that are in decline?
[1] https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/131897/google-to...
[2] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...
> And there will always be oligopolies, always have been, better they be on your side that on your adversaries' side.
They're not on _your_ side, as much as you want to believe they are.
> Morality and shaming others for not following your values never wins, power wins.
Do you think the US is winning? The American people?
Right now, Europeans are "winning" with the highest quality of life in the world. That's not true for the American population.
> Crazy people still don't get it.
I think we can both agree on that.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-037:421 reply >They're not on _your_ side, as much as you want to believe they are.
They're accountable to the government Americans vote for, that's what I meant. Better for them to be accountable to your government than a foreign government.
>Do you think the US is winning? The American people?
You're deflecting instead of answering my question: If Chinese oligopolies would replace them, would the US citizens be winning more or less?
>Right now, Europeans are "winning" with the highest quality of life in the world.
Tell that to Europeans who can't afford a home and who are struggling to pay the bills. HN users constantly pulling out a random statistic off Google to dispute the reality people actually live in is the bane of this forum.
"You see, you can't be doing poorly, because the graph or the statistic shows otherwise". People don't care about meaningless statistics or graphs, they care about what's in their bank account and how that number has evolved(or devolved) compared to the past. People don't care that on paper they're theoretically higher in an index than Americans, when they're relatively worse off than they were 10 - 20 years ago. What matters is how people feel about their situation.
By closewith 2025-06-038:01 > Tell that to Europeans who can't afford a home and who are struggling to pay the bills. HN users constantly pulling out a random statistic off Google to dispute the reality people actually live in is the bane of this forum.
Are you suggesting the housing situation is better in the US of all markets?
> People don't care about meaningless statistics or graphs, they care about what's in their bank account and how that number has evolved(or devolved) compared to the past.
People actually care about much more than that, including family life, health, and human rights, which are all better in the EU than the US.
People's finances are _also_ better in the EU than the US in real terms.
> What matters is how people feel about their situation.
If this is true, people in the EU are _much_ happier with their lives than in the US.
At this point, I'm not sure if you're trolling or completely disconnect with the reality of life in the US?
By ManBeardPc 2025-06-027:344 reply Yes. We free ourselves from the US dependency by... letting Microsoft, Amazon and Google build them. I don't see anything changing, still more and more companies and projects are moving to the US cloud providers. There are discussions and worries but the conclusion is always the same: it's too expensive to move away or not moving to the cloud and there is no non-US alternative. Not generally true IMHO, but many companies are structured in a way that makes a good internal IT nearly impossible.
It was the same in Russia, until West pulled the plug. Well, not exactly the same, there are good clouds in the Russia, but dependency on western services was huge. Now they migrate to Chinese suppliers even for things which could be produced domestically. People never learn.
> It was the same in Russia, until West pulled the plug
The thing is that the EU is not a political monolith, just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president. The anti-US policy comes mostly from France, part of Germany (I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the CDU still sides with the Americans out of the public eye) and from the Nordics, maybe the Dutch, too, but I don't follow them all that closely. Also, Italy has got Meloni who's a lot more buddy-buddy with Trump than with any bureaucrat in Brussels.
People here in Eastern- and Central-Europe are fully aware that if push were to come to the proverbial stove and a hot-war against Russia were to start then none of the Western-Euros would do anything consequential to make it go our (Eastern Europeans' way), just look at Poland in '39, for the simple reason that said Western-Europeans don't have the means of doing that anymore and will probably never be able to do it ever again. So the Americans are the only reliable counter-weight against Russia.
If you look at the amount of support given to Ukraine relative to the economy size, then West Europe dwarfs America's.
I think it is a very good thing for us to be supporting Ukraine and East Europe, but respect and gratitude for it seems to be in very short supply. Especially since East Europe's rapid economic growth has only been possible with untold billions poured into it unselfishly by.. West Europe.
By StefanBatory 2025-06-029:12 And how much brain drain had EE?
I can't blame them, I'm myself too wanting to live in Germany, but keep in mind that this is the price we paid.
By wolvesechoes 2025-06-0211:511 reply > If you look at the amount of support given to Ukraine relative to the economy size, then West Europe dwarfs America's.
And yet Ukraine is still doomed, if only due to demography and people that fled west.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0212:38 The interest of western powers was never really to save Ukraine, but to use it as a tool with which to grind the Russian army to a pulp till it no longer is a threat and can be brought to be complacent to western demands (providing cheap gas and rare earths again), similar to how the western powers used the Soviets to grind down the Wehrmacht even if they didn't actually like or cared for the Soviets at all.
Ukrainian youth and oligarchs with money moving west to raise birth rates and property prices is just the icing on the cake for the western economies.
A depopulated Ukraine is also good for them. More places to mine for rare earth without NIMBYs getting in the way.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-029:04 [flagged]
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0313:301 reply [flagged]
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0319:36 [flagged]
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-0312:43 [flagged]
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-028:44 >just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president
Same with Romania, and why wouldn't they be? The US ensures our defense from Russia, not France, not Germany, not the EU. Their nuclear shield, troops, land and air bases in our country ensured our defense even before we joined the EU so of course we'd grateful for that. The US companies opening well paid tech jobs here is another icing on the cake making us wealthier and also giving the US some assets they might want to defend.
We're too small and poor to have armies that can compete with Russia and we saw how weak and toothless the western European powers are when push comes to shove, ever since they threw us under the Soviet bus in WW2. Polish people know what I'm talking about.
What help would western EU countries be to us in an actual war when in the not too distant past, under Ursula v.d. Leyen, German military couldn't even provide underwear and dog tags to their own conscripts? And besides the sorry state of their military, Germans aren't patriotic enough to stand up for their own people, how can we expect them to care about some Slavs and Eastern Europeans, when they could gladly just cut a deal with Russia for cheap gas to throw us under the bus again?
So of course we're gonna support the US.
By amarcheschi 2025-06-028:473 reply >People here in Eastern- and Central-Europe are fully aware that if push were to come to the proverbial stove and a hot-war against Russia were to start then none of the Western-Euros would do anything consequential to make it go our (Eastern Europeans' way), just look at Poland in '39, for the simple reason that said Western-Europeans don't have the means of doing that anymore and will probably never be able to do it ever again. So the Americans are the only reliable counter-weight against Russia.
What? Do you seriously believe that europe would not intervene in a hot war against Europe?
For the part of USA being counter weight to Russia, they're single handedly alienating themselves from Europe
By fallingknife 2025-06-029:06 They aren't intervening in the current hot war against Europe
> What? Do you seriously believe that europe would not intervene in a hot war against Europe?
With thoughts and prayers, yes, because they have pretty much nothing else remaining. See September 3rd 1939, when on paper Britain was still a super-power. It wasn't, it hadn't been for some time, probably since Passchendaele or since Jutland demonstrated that being a Naval Superpower does absolutely nothing when it comes to a big European land-war. Also, and a lot more recently, see the joke that was their (Britain's and France's) intervention in Libya, the Americans had to come to rescue them up. Pathetic.
The UK has tripwire forces in Estonia, this ship has already sailed my friend.
By wolvesechoes 2025-06-0211:53 And what would UK do if Russia would trip over it?
By StefanBatory 2025-06-029:11 I would have agreed with you up until Trump reelection. Western Europe will abandon us.
But, frankly, America won't come to help either :|
By mschuster91 2025-06-028:18 > There are discussions and worries but the conclusion is always the same: it's too expensive to move away or not moving to the cloud and there is no non-US alternative.
That's due to a combination of multiple factors:
- owning hardware is capex and means assets that depreciate on the balance sheet, which is bad for finance bros. Outsourcing that means opex and no responsibility for assets.
- there are European cloud service providers but they lack the comprehensiveness of AWS/GCE/Azure and in many cases integration into Terraform or other IaC solutions, on top of that they are more expensive than American counterparts
- in the office suite space, there is no "one stop shop" solution like Office 365 offers - it's in the best case a collection of different open source tools that don't have even close to the level of integration that Microsoft offers, there is barely any commercial vendor offering support for all of them (so you have to coordinate with a bunch of vendors).
- On top of that, it's very difficult for open-source solutions to check the "auditability" / "recordkeeping" checkboxes that companies with an exposure to the US stonk market demand, whereas Microsoft does all of that as an integrated and "standard practice"-conformant service
By kristianc 2025-06-027:51 Yes - what this will mean in most if not nearly all situations is using a hyperscaler’s services in a data zone that you or your customers are more comfortable with, not switching off them wholesale.
This is how it always goes in the EU. "The US becomes less reliable/invests less/... so we'll do it and put in a BIG effort" big announcement from Brussels. Usually repeated 5 times or so by some head of state of France and/or Germany.
Then you check the "BIG effort" the EU makes and it's, 10 years of 0 budget + 5% of the budget US invests yearly for 3 years + never looking at it again. To make it worse from that point, they mostly don't divide such budgets across a million small proposals like the US does. No, the politicians in the Brussels find 2 or 3 companies or institutions they like and sign a contract with them. Which results in the many (usually small) companies that actually have accomplishments not getting their business, but big consultancies or institutions or ... getting the contracts by promising to divide the business among pre-agreed subcontractors (doing the EU's job for them, or at least the administration/checking job the US government does in the US, and the subcontractors especially have to be in the right countries). Afterwards, they don't even check what was actually accomplished, and intervening is just unheard of.
Meanwhile you look at it, and you're forced to conclude:
1) scientists will not be leaving the US under Trump. Yes the difference between the EU and US will become smaller, but still heavily in favor of the US (as in >100% difference, factors, not percentage points). In pay, in budget (ie. for research equipment), in infrastructure, in existing knowledge, and of course in future job prospects after research. Also: it's not just the US universities that are coming under increasing pressure.
2) the EU brain drain towards the US will continue in other sectors too (IT, medicine, pharma, ...)
3) cloud business will continue migrating to the US (whether we're talking Salesforce or AWS EC2)
4) factories will keep migrating to the US (already started long before Trump, so it's not his accomplishment, and they won't be providing the jobs hoped for, but they'll keep migrating to the US)
This is basically how Southern Europe goverments work, but at continent scale.
Hence why Nothern countries have such a hard time understanding why we usually have some issues caring to follow all regulations, and are somehow flexible in what to follow.
We have been throughout this way of working across centuries.
You could re-publish the famous Portuguese writer, Eça de Queiroz, books critizing the society from 19th century updated to a modern setting, and most of it would still apply.
By rcarmo 2025-06-036:41 Yep.
By FranzFerdiNaN 2025-06-028:32 Really, peak HN reply this: fully confident about something you know zero about.
