Every data centre is a U.S. military base
policyalternatives.ca
policyalternatives.ca
There's potentially coming a whole lot of European € back to the European market
The real 'military bases' are banks.
That's not the case for digital infrastructure like Google Workspace, Google cloud, Office 365, AWS, etc.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
The EU compelling banks to do business despite US sanctions seems pretty unlikely even if relations continue to degrade.
Microsoft relies on the EUs courts to recognise their property rights.
In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.
The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.
Microsoft executives under oath said that they will not be able to honor those contracts if there is pressure from the US administration. We should know this, but we keep forgetting: laws, contracts, courts etc always bow before political and military might. In peacetime, we delude ourselves into thinking it aint so.
The situation is now clear as day. What op stated is 100 percent correct.
The US will have successfully invaded an EU country by 2027.
They will, if it comes to this, immediately and successfully weaponize all three hyperscalers.
It is abundantly clear where thinks are going.
If any country, organization or company is not prepared for this by mid 2026, they are blind and deaf
The only thing is that weaponizing the hyperscalers would also be disastrous for the hyperscalers. They would be liable to lose their assets in Europe, access to European markets, etc and so on. Which would as a consequence cause a tangible harm to the US economy itself.
Not that in Europe we should rely on it for anything. Any business is wise to move away from any sort of dependency that is subject to US pressure. Governments in particular should consider it a matter of life and death.
Do you think they are going to be quicker reacting to danger from the other side?
I highly doubt it. EU is like a huge steam ship. It takes a lot of effort to turn it. But once it gets going good luck stopping it. This will have consequences for the EU-Us relations for the rest of this century.
I fact it is exactly what a Russian agent if he managed to become a president of US would do. A Putin's wet dream basically. Be hostile enough towards Russia to preserve appearances - seize a tanker or two, while undermining long term US and EU interests (the interests of these two are naturally aligned very well, it takes much more than an idiot to drive a wedge between them).
I always considered that the over reliance on US a weakness. It was comfortable because it postpones some difficult discussions (for example, in terms of defense and military spending it is completely bonkers for the EU to not act as a federal entity). Since this subject is thorny, it was alright to rely on the US for defense and just kick this can down the road.
The US becoming hostile at least forces the countries in the EU to face reality a little, and perhaps speed some things up (see for example the recent EU-Mercosur trade agreement).
these companies have datacenters in Europe too. It is not wild to think that if push comes to shove and US cut off Europe, then Europeans can just take control over those European data centers and restore access to GCP/AWS/Azure in Europe because these datacenters are on their soil and predominantly employing Europeans.
Good luck with that. Those systems are extremely interconnected. We should (and are) be building sovereign EU equivalents to not just cloud providers but also major services like google/ms 365 and so on.
Meh.
EU need to start with own PC hardware factories first. And PC compatible designs. What is unlikely - on first sight of troubles they will buy everything from US. As all good 3rd Word countries do.
Losing access to data is potentially worse than losing access to your bank account. I doubt Microsoft will let you grab a copy of all your emails after they block/ban you.
This is a very major inconvenience.
I know the goverment has a lot of power over even the largest companies, but these companies also have power, and moving into a world in which AWS, Apple, Microsoft, and Google can only operate in the US, and maybe with the Saudis, isn't going to be good for shareholders.
They bent a knee to this administration so fast. I'm curious to see if there will be an equally fast pivot in the other direction when Trump starts showing holes in his armor. There will come a time when corporate greed no longer points in the direction of Trumpism.
Monitoring of "hostile" workloads at datacentre scale is not going to work.
Should we throw away 80 years of trade, cooperation, and the resulting prosperity and go back into ridiculous tribalism?
The US is already doing that, pretending otherwise is just hopeless naivete.
All we can do is face the facts and pick up the pieces.
And all the US leaders are united in fascism: denying worker rights, slave economy, and private contracts trumping national laws and regulations.
It's not "all the US leaders" and those are quite a small fraction of "all of the US". Then, despite some similarities, it's not "fascism" either. I mean, seek friends, don't create enemies.
I see a lot of Europeans here have written the US off which is a huge mistake... I'd say, you fell for the trick.
Don't forget to take a careful look at your own EU leaders and beware of your own nationalism, you (the EU) are definitely one of the actors in this theater. I'd say, study history, look around your own backyard, think, it's not as simple as it seems.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to diversify email or other digital services, but this is still a technical solution to a political problem - a temporary patch at best, useless for any meaningful stretch of time.
Which thankfully amazingly might happen!!! https://www.techerati.com/news-hub/eu-pushes-for-open-source...
Operating systems are even easier - pick your flavour of Linux - devices are all made in China anyway.
Its the cloud and software part that sucks. VPSes aside, almost any managed service is US based.
AI has made this even worse.
Managed services weren’t needed because big tech was bending to EU regulations and buying out alternatives. The services aren’t rocket science; plenty of euro devs participated and still participate in building them, they’re just on US big tech payrolls. Expertise is there, money isn’t, yet.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
ie time to move their gov infrastructure way the hell out of US tech company hands