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Comment by dmzxnico | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense since the AI in Europe is being regulated to the neck and investments in data centers, chip factories are much more expensive and difficult to operate.

There's a lot more market opportunities in China and USA...

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As someone who works at a small data center on AI topics, that's a bit misleading. (Speaking for myself, not my employer of course.) Regulation is not a bottleneck, supply is. We are buying as many GPUs as we can and are waiting months for them, and still barely keep up with demand. And the government support, while it could always be more ;-), feels fairly generous compared to other fields at the moment.

We would probably buy slightly worse value European GPUs if they were available right now.

There is regulation and people moan about it. But realistically the AI act and other laws give us legal certainty (a German favorite) and the requirements are not so onerous. We pay a lawyer to figure it out and he tells us to slap a few "AI generated" labels on our website and to have a couple of procedures in the drawer and that's it. ISO 9001, 27001, C5 or whatever you can get as a cloud provider are orders of magnitude more hassle.

If you’re building an AI data center, you are not a customer of ASML. You are a customer of NVIDIA, who is a customer of TSMC, who is a customer of ASML.

Building a competitor to TSMC is definitely something Europeans would like, but it’s also a multi-decade undertaking.

Where are you seeing that it’s being heavily regulated? The only thing I’ve seen is land procurement but that’s been a European problem for centuries now.

GDPR and other privacy related regulations have existed for basically a decade at this point so it should not be a surprise that companies need to follow those laws.

Anecdotally, there is data center and energy buildout talk here in the Netherlands, a country where land is the top priority for everyone.

Europe might not have a “frontier” lab but this is absolutely investment happening at breakneck pace.

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