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  breve
  A necessary step to reduce risk to infrastructure given that the US government has become erratic and has decided it is now anti-Europe.The US means to undermine the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...The US means to annex European territory: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eoIt's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
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  flumpcakes
  Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech, reinforcing the US's position as a global powerhouse. (Meanwhile US tech is built on the shoulders of their allies.) Now we see these same allies are starting to look inward and invest in technology they own completely because the US is acting decisively not like an ally. Something unthinkable since WW2.I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.
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  esperent
  It seems every single comment in the thread is understanding "cloud" here to mean AWS vs Hetzner. But it's clear from the first paragraph of the article that what they actually mean is MS 365 Dynamics vs SAP. They primarily want a managed ERP + CRM solution, not servers.
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  jillesvangurp
  Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere.People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete.This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product.We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.
• thdrtol
  It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship.Airbus has the ability to move their data to another location, but it is very problemetic that all people with a social account can't. Sure, you can delete your Facebook account but it will take years for you profile to be gone because we all know your data is sold to other parties.My only option is to keep in mind that everything I put online will one day be read by some evil entity. Even my IP address that Hacker News might store (I don't know, but servers log stuff).
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  Havoc
  I really hope regulators don't back down on this.Half a billion people shouldn't be reliant on whether a guy with clown makeup is having a dementia moment.Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country. Actually in house not big tech EU "sovereign" cloud wink wink nudge
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  _ache_
  Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager". It's a step in financing EU sovereign cloud providers.
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  wrxd
  > estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable providerIt would be nice to know what the requirements are. There are plenty of providers in the EU happy to sell cloud services
• adamcharnock
  In case any SME-sized companies here are wanting to do something similar but are looking askance at the risk/investment/hiring required, then we'd [0] love to talk to you.We specialise in doing this but on a smaller scale. Eg. 10-100 person companies that have 0-to-a-few DevOps engineers. Included is DevOps time each month to use as you wish, we're on call for SLAs, around 50% reduced cost vs AWS/Google/Azure, etc.Somewhat differently to most, we deploy onto bare metal. In addition to dropping costs we typically see at least a 2x speed-up overall. Once client just reported a 80% reduction in processing time.CTOs like us because we're always on-hand via Slack (plus we're the ones getting woken up in the night), and CFOs like us because billing becomes consistent.Anyway, blatant pitch complete.[0]: https://lithus.eu/adam@ above domain
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  jacquesm
  And not just Airbus. Very quietly there is a lot of stuff being moved out of the US and away from MS, AWS, Google etc. Trump has absolutely no idea what he's doing and comes across as the proverbial bull in a China shop.History books a hundred years hence will have some choice things to say about how we all stood by and let this happen.
• antman
  Given it was revealed that CIA specifically targeted 200million deals and above, it was political naivety amounting ti gross negligence on behalf of Airbus executives that it took them 10 years. Same for many other large organisations and countries, unbelieveable.Why did it have to be Trump to make them take action?https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-wikileaks-economy/...
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  Doches
  I wonder if this includes Skywise, the Palantir-built data lake and design stack that they use for many many internal operations (design, airline support, manufacturing). Not sure what difference it really makes where the data is hosted if the folks doing the hosting call home to Colorado…
• crabmusket
  > estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable providerI must be terribly fussy but this genuinely tripped me up while reading. What does this phrasing even mean? Is it an 80% chance of success? This seems like someone has heard the phrase "80/20 rule" and applied it somewhere it makes no sense.
• 7492632928
  Sovereign from the EU regime?
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  sunshine-o
  He is my free advise for Airbus:1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place)2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?"If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century.- [0] https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-...
• eurekin
  "sovereign Euro cloud", ah good chuckle
• PeterStuer
  Good, but how independent of US service providers is S/4HANA in practice?
• andrewstuart
  Weird.If it matters so much, run your own computer systems don’t use any cloud.
• tjpnz
  Sounds like they're adopting EU cloud but will continue to use Google Suite. Surely there are viable EU based alternatives further up the stack?
• jmyeet
  This administration has done more to undermine US power than probably any in history. This isn't a new statement either (eg [1]). Personally, I think that's not such a bad thing because we are the bad guys. I know people get all in their feelings when you say stuff like that but the number of democratically elected governments we've overthrown, just to get their resources, is indefensible.This week it broke that China is pretty far along in duplicating EUV litthography. The US restricts ASML, a Dutch company, from exporting their best machines to China and Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese companies from exporting their chips to China. The second one was a massive mistake. Why? Because it created a marekt for China to produce chips because they had no other choice.Geopolitically I think this is very similar to the USSR copying the atomic bomb in just 4 years after WW2 where US leaders either thought it was impossible or would take 20+ years.The US has become unpredictable and unreliable. Ukraine is a big part of this because Europe is waking up to them having to be responsible for their own defense and that ultimately will undermine US power projection through NATO.Since very early in this administration, probably back when the tariff nonsense began, I believed that Europe would be forced to distance themselves from US tech giants and at some point the EU would require cloud storage to be within EU borders and eventually require European companies to own and run that cloud rather than US companies.China has their own version of virtually every tech company. I can see the EU moving in this direction for key functions and cloud is likely the first of those.What's really precarious is the entire US economy is now essentially a bet on US companies owning a global AI future and I honestly don't think it's going to happen, mainly because China won't let it happen. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow for this and only the beginning.What you really need to remember about the current administration is we're not even 1 year into a 4 year term with everything that's happened and the entire foreign policy is kleptocratic not strategic in nature.[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775985
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  sylware
  Airbus is putting all its design on internet? wow...
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  jasonvorhe
  Having worked with all major European clouds: Good luck, have fun opening a lot of support cases for things that should work ootb.
• anon
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