I'm cautiously optimistic. The Cloud and AI Development Act looks especially interesting:

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# Capacity

* at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years;

* simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres;

* improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing; ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensive applications.

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Given the prevalence of 'degrowth' ideas here in the EU and the severe NIMBY problem (even with stuff as basic as housing let alone data centres), I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to be able to pull this off.

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cryo32 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Based on the Iran war situation I don't think we should be building more datacentres for security. They are easy targets. We should be concentrating on resilience and that means distributing capacity and capability where possible.

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dgellow 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You’re describing having a bunch of data centers in different location and enough redundancy. What makes you against data centers themselves? They are just a way to pool resources to benefit from economy of scale. They don’t have to be enormous

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cryo32 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Centralised "economies of scale" mean consolidating risks into geographical and corporate ownership. I mean look at the current situation: that consolidation means there are a few corporate players, any of whom could just pull the plug on a huge amount of infrastructure in a war or other geopolitical mess.

Also we have a layer of abstraction above the datacentre now which is the cloud provider. And that does not necessarily (especially in our case) have an economic advantage. And it is again a single point of failure. One cloud provider compromise and the scope of compromise is across multiple datacentres and businesses and potentially national governments.

I'm suggesting bringing a lot of stuff back in house or within tens of thousands of small datacentres where there's a few racks max. And we keep our abstraction depth low.

I'd go as far as designing things to be permanently disconnected or just occasionally connected these days. Even single-user stuff reaches into clouds and datacentres when it doesn't need to.

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RandomLensman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Large domestic corporates pulling the plug in a war seems unlikely to impossible as wars tend to go with what are effectively command economies.

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cryo32 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not just pulling the plug. It's serious economic disparity between regions and legally mandated espionage as well.

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RandomLensman an hour ago | parent [-]

If the EU had own large corporate hyperscalers that would be an issue there for the EU?

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cryo32 an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes it would still. Which is why I think the process is misguided. I mean look at Hungary which was a near miss. It needs to be resilient to state failure as well.

This means that the entire idea of a corporate EU spanning hyperscaler should never exist.

	▲	RandomLensman an hour ago \| parent [-]
		State failure is something the Europeans have experience in dealing with. That aside: how much would that cost in lost economies of scale?

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johannes1234321 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For distributing having more data centers seems like a prerequisit to me.

One can argue about size etc, though.

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TacticalCoder an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm more than cautious too:

> ... initiatives that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing across each stage of the value chain, from chips, to infrastructure, to software, cloud and AI, and in synergy with past and ongoing initiatives such as AI Factories and AI Gigafactories

Software / Cloud: yes, Europe can try to do something but I doubt it. Although it should be pointed out that the EU has one software company in the Top 100 companies in the world by market cap. One. And it's that fucking lame piece of uber-shit that SAP is.

SAP: that's what europeans can do. While the US has Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, CloudFlare, etc. Not that these are all great companies but these are heavyweights compared to that pointless, irrelevant, turd that SAP is.

Chips? Besides ASML (which is only part of the chain), we're a wasteland and ASML is mostly US-owned.

Not going to see the next Intel / AMD / NVidia from the EU: that simply is not going to happen. It just won't.

AI gigafactories? Bull-fucking-crap.

The only area where Europe can try something is software but this must be put in perspective: SAP vs all the US software companies.

Don't forget all we could do is SAP. And that is a monstrous piece proprietary lock-in shit.

	▲	Vespasian 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		ok how would you recommend to get started? Doing nothing will change nothing.

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hanzeweiasa an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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