[dataking]

I didn’t see any mention of EU’s last attempt to build a sovereign cloud: Gaia-X. I think that didn’t really go anywhere due to disagreements over technical direction. Much like Quaero.

Don’t get me wrong, I hope it goes better this time and the author acknowledges the many pitfalls of such a complex undertaking.

Edit: The author previously discussed Gaia-X at length here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...

[sam_lowry_]

Unfortunately Gaia-X has been set up and run by the wrong kind of people.

Look at this recent job ad for a Senior Software Developer / Tech Lead: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4181090679

AFAIU it's written by the CTO and see this gem:

" Innovation Mindset: Willingness to explore new technologies – especially related to trust frameworks and associated standards –, staying ahead (no kidding!) of main-stream industry trends (This is a real requirement, not ChatGPT – just look into our GitLab repos!)."

I checked their public GitLab and it's puny. Moreover, I suspect based on the use of bold and bullet points that the job description itself went through ChatGPT.

[realusername]

At the end it's just a market problem, no alternative can emerge because the US cloud companies are way too large.

Remove them of the picture and the market will solve itself very quickly, most of the companies to replace them are already there in a weaker form.

The cloud platforms are nowhere near as hard to replace as the chips.

[grumpy-de-sre]

Without protection, a EU hyperscaler will never emerge. It's not that any hypothetical future EU hyperscaler would be an inherently less competitive. It's just plain old first mover advantage. Cloud computing is a VERY sticky good, and once folks got on AWS/Azure no matter how good your product is there's no way larger customers are going to migrate off to some "risky" startup (thus keeping scale small).

Source: I worked on a sovereign cloud PaaS in Germany. Admittedly the project was a disaster, hiring talent in the infrastructure space here is really tough. Probably mostly due to a lack of opportunities to acquire experience domestically and noncompetitive wages limiting migration of those with experience.

Gaia-X is a total dumpster fire though, perfect example of what's wrong with the EU. All the money was spent paying bureaucrats, consults, and standards committee folks to architecture astronaut and design by committee sovereign cloud "standards" bullshit bingo. None of the money went to the engineers.

We should really copy the Chinese approach here, straight out clone a subset of the best/most popular parts of AWS/Azure/GCP. I'm open to contracting opportunities in this space BTW (email in profile).

[realusername]

I'm expecting that to happen. Realistically, the US tech companies are the very first target in line in a market war.

They are paying very low taxes in the EU, contributing enormously on the US economy and are close to the president. That has to be the biggest target.

And the US can't even use the EU defense card anymore to defend them as Trump wasted it with his Russian appeasement.

I'd rate this probability at 50% at least.

[grumpy-de-sre]

Suffice to say as an EU based engineer in the infrastructure space, I'm rather optimistic for my future employment opportunities.

[ofrzeta]

It's more or less covert subsidies for the usual suspects. In Germany that means the like of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Atos, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, BMW and Siemens get some millions (and by "some" I mean around 200 million euro). If there's no outcome, like in the GAIA-X case, it's just bad luck for the taxpayer.

[Aeolun]

If you start with a shitty name like that you have failed before you even start in my opinion.

Even the utterly straightforward eucloud is better. Or make it cloud.eu :)

[cadamsdotcom]

Disagreements over direction should be solved by making separate orgs/initiatives to go test each approach.

Better than funding “one true initiative” and force people to work together to keep the funding.

The VC funding model succeeds in experimental domains by letting many experiments run at once. Kind of a form of Darwinism. How to do that with funded initiatives is a really interesting challenge.

[skywal_l]

The impression I have, but I may be wrong, is that investors in Europe want a return on every investment. Failure is not an option. Which kind of choke innovation.

[kichimi]

This is not true, the problem is greed and imo a lack of ROI.

[kichimi]

This is not their last, there is another one with funding thats building off the learned lessons of Gaia-X.