[ben_w]

A separation of what? Reads like you mean "Europe and the US"?

For stuff like these examples, oh yes it can separate. It would be painful to replace, but even supply chain destruction (i.e. even if substitution isn't ready to replace the severed connections) is absolutely a possibility - to think otherwise is the mistake Russia made about its supply of fuel to the EU allowing it to take Ukraine without consequence.

Right now, the EU is looking at Trump and thinking he's arrogant enough to try military action against us. Canada and Mexico are hopefully making similar plans.

But even without Trump, we can't trust China not to call Taiwan's bluff on using TSMC as a hostage against being invaded, nor against the North/South Korean conflict resuming.

[aurareturn]

You can't separate such that you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips, and other software and hardware that make AI work.

[ben_w]

There's going to be other people working on the hardware separately to this. Hard to do, of course. Protectionism is a painful defenseive measure.

> you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips

Depends how hard you burn them. GPUs in this usage wear out fast from electromigration, but "we have no new ones and what we have lasts 9 months" is very different from "SaaS contract got Force Majure'd overnight".

All the EU sovreign cloud stuff right now is because governments fear Trump may invade, threaten to ban business immediately if we resist; SaaS cancellations cause harm instantly, before he TACOs out, whereas a hardware supply stop we may outlast him being told "no" by the stock market.