| ▲ | ThinkBeat 3 hours ago | |
The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty, which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously lacking. Terms used like; “European hyperscale cloud” “Sovereign infrastructure” “Strategic autonomy” “European data centers for critical workloads” Which ended up in various efforts and projects Digital Europe Programme, Recovery and Resilience Facility, IPCE (I am not deeply familiar with EU projects) I believe funding was around low hundreds of millions (€) total To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion. The second problem is that systems that were suggested out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers, etc. It is not like the EU member states could not fund it, some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have spent €350 billion in Ukraine. That is not to say they should not do that, nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other but it is demonstration that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts, If deemed important enough. and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will to really invest in digital sovereignty. | ||
| ▲ | Certhas 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening... | ||