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Hardware: Spot on. There are European or open-source alternatives for just about everything. Beginning with the OS, there's Linux and going all the up in the stack, we've got stuff like Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, and so on. Some hardware is produced in Europe. Goodram is a nice example. What we do not have is a processor architecture, nor factories. The closest to European is ARM. It is a British company, which is good, but outside the EU, and controlled by a Japanese holding, and fabless. Being fabless is the main issue here. (Edit: The Raspberry Pi is a strategic showcase of the status. It is a non-EU European product, uses a non-EU European ISA, ARM, but the chip implementing that ISA is made by a US company, Broadcom, and the Pi is the closest that we can get in terms of strategic autonomy). I believe that our over-reliance on x64 is by far our biggest risk. ARM's existence should give us some comfort, but I don't think that it is enough, though. If I were to define a EU strategy for digital sovereignty, one of my cornerstones would be to bet on an ISA architecture and have a strategy to bring to Europe at least one CPU factory. I don't think that starting from scratch would be a viable option. However, betting on an existing open source architecture like RISC-V to make it far more mainstream could be viable. No matter how much we'd invest on RISC-V and how successful it would become, the point wouldn't be to make other blocs dependent on us, but to sever our current dependence on them. |
Maybe Goodram can then assemble their chips into consumer products? :-)