[carom]

OVH is a hosting company. I am not talking about hosting. Where are the companies with knowledge on how to deploy data center scale compute jobs? Where are the pioneers in this?

That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability. This is the price. Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products. I hope for your sake that I am wrong.

[hnlmorg]

> That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability.

You keep saying this but I’m not seeing any evidence it’s true. There have always been plenty of companies in Europe that have had data centre scale compute too (plus managing a data centre requires that level of understanding as well so I don’t agree with you dismissing OVH.

Plus you keep saying it’s taken a decade for the EU to catch up and on those timescales it would put things before GDPR et al. Thus EU legislation would have no impact even if your point was true.

> Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products.

At risk of sounding repetitive: I work for a European AI firm.

We actually have a lot of American clients — so the exact inverse of the point you’re making.

[carom]

This is a fairly common analysis.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...

[hnlmorg]

This is the key part:

> Although Europe has many high-performing companies, in aggregate European companies underperform relative to those in other major regions: they are growing more slowly, creating lower returns, and investing less in R&D than their US counterparts.

which is exactly what I’ve been saying. There are plenty of high performing companies in Europe, we just aren’t as aggressive in chasing growth for growths sake.

If you want to ask why that is, then I’d argue it’s more a cultural thing than it is to do with legislation.

Should that culture change? Personally I’d rather it didn’t. Personally I think America needs to change to become more customer focused because a lot of American businesses are really shitty to deal with.

I get this point will be an unpopular opinion on a VC forum like HN. But it just goes to demonstrate that the situation isn’t so black and white as you’ve been making out.