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Comment by pastage | Hacker News Reader

Agreed Europe has never had to care about that because we have always supported the US. Now there is always Loongson/Zhaoxin to base your infra on. Considering the way the US is heading you might see people considering a "neutral party" in the war.

AWS is nice and all not unique though.

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You absolutely could go bare-metal with emerging local platforms and a Chinese stack — that’s the path Russia (and obviously China itself) is heading down. But...

Equinix? US. Digital Realty? US. NTT? Japan. Interxion? US. CyrusOne? US. That’s your top five DC/colo operators in Europe.

Same story with Tier-1 and Tier-1.5 ISPs.

It’s not just software. It’s not even just hardware. It’s the whole stack — down to power grids, land property rights, and regulatory frameworks.

Nationalization? Multidecade supply chain reconfiguration? Trillions in investment to rebuild local capacity — likely still with deep reliance on China for core infra components.

Europe isn’t just "a bit dependent" — it’s completely entangled.

And that is not an excuse to do nothing. Much to the opposite, it should be an acknowledgement of risk, and that steps should be taken to have an infrastructure less dependent on foreign nations. Especially when they are hostile, such as the US right now.

Would the investor even outlive the investment though? Imagine building data centers in the UK — only to get Brexit halfway through.

Any long-term, shared investment relies on continuous, guaranteed political and economic unity. Today it’s the US that’s hostile — but how confident can you be that tomorrow it won’t be a PiS-led Poland, or even an AfD-led Germany?

Every sort of investiment of any magnitude is subject to risk, and some of those are geopolitical in nature.

Is Europe less stable than other countries?

I do not think completely entangled is a problem, it is just that there will be actual reasons to look for alternatives how ever bad they are. Considering that the EU is under fire from the current president of the US it is going to affect how people think in the EU.

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