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by swiftcoder 5 days ago
It would certainly be interesting to have a highly respected EU-native inference provider, if only to make the regulatory gods happy
7 comments

OVH already provides this → https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/ai-endpoints/catalo...

It works great.

Scaleway have two separate (one fully managed one a bit less) services for that:

https://www.scaleway.com/en/generative-apis/

https://www.scaleway.com/en/inference/

yea, but no prompt caching right? This makes it unusable for my usecase at least, the cost would be insane
They confirmed on LinkedIn that they are working on it.

Also, they have a feature request that has been getting many votes recently: https://feature-request.scaleway.com/posts/1251/prompt-cachi...

Scaleway does that already but competition is always good.
Does not scale in my pocket unfortunately.
IONOS (1&1) also offers inference hosted in europe/germany: https://cloud.ionos.com/managed/ai-model-hub
No Qwen 3.6? Why?
Because they're not serious about their offerings. They are an ISP and like to provide/bundle very basic additional services (hosting, mail, etc. and now 'AI')
IONOS is established, but uh, 'respectable' is another question...
STACKIT also offers model serving.
agree. I have a usecase for a bigger open-weight model hosted by an EU company and the selection isnt really great, hard to make the regulatory gods (and the devs) happy at the same time right now
To all mentions of IONOS / StackIT / OVH:

All of these are lightyears behind US/China LLM offerings. None of them offer any model close to open-source SOTA. Runtime and reliability is a disaster and sure enough you have to pay a "sovereignty" mark up.

Freedom isn't free. Unless you want to live in a world were your children have to read the bible in class sacrifice has to be made.
Paying a premium for inferior service quality is not exactly freedom
I live in the EU and want to live in a world where my children actually CAN read the Bible in class. However that’s not really possible anymore…

(Also no, modern science is (still) not incompatible with (the Christian) religion. I want my children to have both, as do I, or at least be taught both, so they can decide for themselves what they want when they are grown enough to do so.)

Who is sacrificing what, really?

Never understood why hetzner gets brought up so positively here when there are dozens of EU competitors who are just as good and don't run 7 year old discounted servers
> don't run 7 year old discounted servers

That's a pretty big part of why, honestly. How many of us are running server workloads that actually need the price/performance tradeoff of cutting edge server hardware?

We're not even talking cutting edge. If you browse hetzner's auction page you can see they're renting machines with almost decade old CPUs like the Xeon W-2145 or i7 6700. That's just a lot of old hardware..
Well. Yeah. The auction page is the leftovers; if you want current stuff then you're in the wrong spot on their site
So? If it's cheaper and gets the job done who cares?
I mean if you run serious stuff on a non-ECC CPU from 2015, you'll probably have a bad time.

They're great for hobbyists but people on here keep bringing them up as the flagbearer of euro hosting

I have several production services running right now on AWS t2 instances, which were released in 2016. For a service that isn't performance-critical, it's perfectly fine (and a significant cost savings) to run on decade-old hardware.

ECC vs non-ECC is also pretty irrelevant on a box with < 64GB of memory

serious stuff like what? majority of people don't work on scale you probably are thinking about.
Because nobody ever mentions them by name, leaving all of us in the dark.
Upcloud, Scaleway, Clever cloud, etc.
These are all solid choices, but significantly less performance/€

Understandably too, because hetzner is running things on consumer hardware vs the enterprise hardware the others use