It looks more like B2B cloud at least from past informations about it not sure about AWS rivality.
More than that, AWS is just one piece of the pie. Azure supposedly made about $38bn last year, also growing by about 30% per year.
Alibaba and GCP both made about $10bn and they're both growing at about the same pace as Azure and AWS.
And I didn't even include IBM or Oracle.
How much is Lidl actually investing in this? A few billions, at most?
I'd love to be proven wrong and I definitely think Europe needs at least a few top notch cloud providers, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
While you have a point in general, I have no idea from where you got your numbers...
Lidl had revenue of 100.8bn EUR (~108bn USD) in 2021, the entire Schwarz Group of 133.6bn EUR [0].
>How much is Lidl actually investing in this?
Nitpicking, but Lidl isn't, Schwarz Group is. I suppose how much they will invest is a matter of how promising it will look. Remember that amazon started out selling books. ;)
I genuinely think that Schwarz Group has a real chance to become a player in the long run, at least in Europe, if they really try. If it happens, it will not happen quickly. But they seem to have the "company culture" to make it happen, the deep pockets to make it happen, the political connections too. They are however a new player in this "IT thing". They might as well end up scraping the idea again, or be content on just being a datacenter provider for colo for other EU deep pockets instead of offering the full range of AWS services.
[0] https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-05/19/schwarz-gruppe-steigert-...