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Another European agency shifts off US Tech as digital sovereignty gains steam

(www.zdnet.com)
245 points CrankyBear | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 16:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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mentalgear ◴[31 Oct 25 17:38 UTC] No.45774588[source]▶
Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president?

If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.

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anon291 ◴[31 Oct 25 18:33 UTC] No.45775182[source]▶
Literally no other country or market with the perhaps exception of China has anything close to its own tech stack. Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him. He now lives in Portland, 3 hours from where windows is made and 10 hours away from OS X. Literally the entire tech industry is the west coast of the United States.

The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude. Europe is basically hopeless at this point

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1. deaux ◴[31 Oct 25 19:43 UTC] No.45775919[source]▶
No Korean government services rely on US hyperscalers (which is the subject of this post). I'm 99% sure the same goes for financial institutions. Those are the key infra and they're sovereign. A lot of big companies do have some things on US hyperscalers, but even that is a relatively small percentage. Overwhelmingly things are on prem.

And now someone will link "but there was just a fire that resulted in many online gov services being down for weeks!!!". Yes. And having that happen once in a decade, after which measures will be taken so that from now on it happens once in 3 decades, is absolutely 100x preferable to depending on US hyperscalers like EU governments do. As we just saw, it's not like AWS and Azure don't go down.

Sure, they don't have their own OS. But even much of China still runs on Windows. China might manage to get entirely rid of it at some point but not yet.

Doesn't Intel depend on ASML when their chip machines break? I don't think there exists a single country in the world that can currently produce a significant amount of full-stack, modern compute. If there is one, it's definitely China rather than the US.