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schnitzelstoat

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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Degrowth was only popular in Germany, UK and Spain. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/no-solid-scientific-basis-deg...

Germany and UK follow a the no growth and it is very unpopular. Spain's economy gives a shit and grows.

You seem somewhat confused about this issue. Degrowth has little to do with abstract economic numbers such as GDP, and precisely criticizes its very concept. Degrowth is an alternative to greenwashing, aka "green growth" destroying our planet in the name of saving it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth

"Degrowth is an academic and social movement[1] aimed at the planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption as a solution to social-ecological crises.[2] "

Giving the first sentence this would lead to a smaller GDP. We see the results of a stagnating GDP in Germany and UK and democratically people don't like it.

Spain's economy grows but unemployment is still a massive problem because the main industries are seasonal, low-paid agricultural and hospitality work. To switch to a high-tech, high value-add economy would requires deep changes that would be painful for many voters.

The current government still plans to close all the nuclear reactors, it's still hard to get permission for construction (leading to a massive housing crisis despite having a surplus of housing in 2007, before the crisis).

That said, degrowth only seems to be a popular view among the leftist elite and I'm sure that once the consequences start to bite (we had a blackout in Spain, the energy prices are incredibly high in the UK and Germany - leading to a loss of jobs as factories close) then the electorate will profoundly reject this ideology.

Disclaimer: i think you'd consider me into degrowth

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

Who would that benefit? We already have too many of them treating too much data. Mom and pop shops don't need more data centers. Consumers don't need more data centers. Citizens don't need more data centers.

You probably know very well that any new data center will be used exclusively for surveillance technology and so called "artificial intelligence", which in my opinion are net negatives for society.

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.

ok how would you recommend to get started? Doing nothing will change nothing.

Make the work market, business market and everything 90% less complicated across EU. I would actually dictatorially made all work and company laws obsolete. EU company, flat tax 20%, goodbye. One month no reason firing. I just thought about how crazy is the car situation, you move somewhere with your car, for couple months and you SHOULD reregister your car, because of law and insurance, costs money, then you go back and again deregister and it costs money again. Millions of things like this. As if there cant be one EU car register and just insurance flow based on where you reside. Even the residence is different by every counry. Some need you to change “permanent” residence and ID and everything it touches. Some you just say i live here now, here is electricity bill, done. Law harmonization is the stupidest thing. Either make one EU law or do not put nose into it. Every country makes it differently, some even more strict than EU requires for no reason.

> EU company, flat tax 20%, goodbye. One month no reason firing.

thats how you get a hyper capitalist nightmare like south korea. firing with less bureaucracy makes sense but if your company really needs it that is already a legal reason, american style at will employment just takes away stability from workers.

for the tax part i support lower or zero VAT (taxing consumption is always regressive) but we need to replace it with high and progressive taxes on paid out profits, both dividends and buybacks/indirect payouts. at least 60% for the top bracket. also capping total comp to 5x the companys median like in some nordic countries.

They should stop sending people to jail for operating a website with UGC, a public WiFi hotspot, or for completing the wrong bureaucratic forms. However free the US is, Europe is the opposite extreme. Everything has a bureaucratic process and if you don't do it right you go to jail. I'm stuck there and scared to do anything innovative.

> Chips?

Only ST, NXP, Nexperia, Osram, and a bunch more obscure ones. It's not a boom, but it's far from a wasteland

Infineon as well, but all those EU semi companies mostly make cheap low margin chips that more or less compete with the commodity chips of China and Taiwan but not with the IP from the US or even Israel who designs and sometimes also makes mostly high margin CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, switching fabric, cellular modems, etc stuff that the EU uses and imports a lot but has no domestic players in.

In that regard yes, the EU semi industry is kind of a wasteland, considering how big the EU and how small its semi industry is.

ARM?

NOKIA was the only competitive/innovative EU company until US funds with high stakes in MS bought it, planted their trojan horse of a CEO and made it into a headless chicken sacrificed for a chance of MS to stay relevant in the mobile industry.

> simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres

With the caveat (one hopes) of learning from the mistakes of the US.

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.

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

One can argue about size etc, though.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

State failure is something the Europeans have experience in dealing with.

That aside: how much would that cost in lost economies of scale?

You could have written exactly same thing about refineries - from Russian perspective the bigger refinery the bigger target for Ukrainians.

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