European companies are so deeply entrenched in American software ecosystem I can’t even. Just this past week my EU company deployed an agentic LLM hosted on Microsoft Azure with models developed by… Microsoft, on top of the existing GPT hosted on the same platform. They also recently moved their entire in-house HR platform to Oracle.
It’s no mistake China banned foreign companies with infinite money from setting up shop there. It is dangerous and expensive in the long run.
But would they still if the EU used tariff like policy to prohibit it? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best time is now." Make the law, enforce the law, encourage the behavior and outcomes necessary to achieve the success criteria.
As someone with an infra background a lifetime ago, I am confident I could spin up Kubernetes and Deepseek R1 in OVH or Hetzer within a few days. The primitives exist, the EU simply needs to lean into cultivating and supporting them (orgs, platforms, etc) to push EU entities consuming these services away from US Tech. Perhaps the tech stack is a national security interest, just as a manufacturing base and supply chain is. Better to be prepared than to be entrenched in the US Tech ecosystem and then suddenly be held hostage for reasons.
If you look at other countries/regions that impose high tariffs, their companies continue to buy and use American technologies and absorb the cost (to their local customers' detriment).
I'd certainly enjoy the case studies of European enterprises jumping from full-scale Azure and AWS deployments to OVHcloud or Hetzner, though. That'd make for some interesting reading.
But what if they outright ban it, as the US was going to do with TikTok (for national security reasons)? This it the tech services version of Nord Stream.
It's not really workable. The real-world impact of a TikTok ban, even if it outright stopped working on every American device overnight is pretty minimal; people stop watching videos, and some influencers lose their jobs.
If my (Canadian) government decides to ban Azure in a year, my critical infrastructure company ignores it for 11 months because they figure it won't actually happen, and then goes to the government to tell them that if the ban actually goes through, our infrastructure stops working because we'd actually need a multi-year timeframe to migrate off of Azure.
Everyone knows spinning things up is a piece of piss. It's the on-going maintenance and economies of scale that aren't. Not to mention migration, compliance, etc
Tariffs don’t really work for software, especially if the software provider holds lots of foreign government contracts, and you assume the foreign government and provider are colluding to get control over your systems.
The EU’s problem is that it doesn’t foster company growth on any level and doesn’t help with problems specific to the EU (e.g. multiple languages, differing laws, varying levels of unionization, and more).
Blaming Trump for their own well-known problems is silly. They were dependent on the US before him and they will continue to be dependent on the US after him until they look in the mirror and decide to fix what is broken.
Hosting LLMs at scale without Azure/Bedrock is still a massive pain, and they offer EU based data sovereignty, so not clear what the problem is there (or are we now saying no doing business with US companies at all?)
If Microsoft is providing EU data sovereignty, then they’re either in violation of US law (the US CLOUD Act, specifically) or do not have the technical capability to access data on those servers. (So, for instance, the machines could be air gapped, or they could be configured to never honor MS credentials, including on the software update path).
In practice, this means no US cloud providers provide foreign data sovereignty (though many claim to).
The CLOUD Act is incompatible with basic data protection rights.
As long as whatever sham of a data protection agency was nominally functional in the US european elites could convince themselves that it was legal to transfer personal data to some US corporations, but now that agency is defunct.
But yeah, it's a bad idea to do business with empires. Sooner or later they turn to bullying and extortion.
As a UK based engineer, I wish. I cannot for the life of me even get an interview, maybe first level HR interview for US companies. Meanwhile when applying for UK jobs, no problem.
Don't know what it is. Am I not fake enough? Not forcing fake smiles and excluding obnoxious positivity constantly? Not ego stroking the interviewer? Am I doomed to, in comparison to US, poverty wages?
I'm not sure if you've misunderstood, so apologies if this is old news. US companies may have teams of engineers in various other countries. But they almost always pay local market rate. In much the same way US companies will pay teams in India their local market rate (which is less again).
My last company paid 2-2.5x a UK salary for a US engineer. Perhaps the ratio for a company like Meta is closer, but I doubt it's equal. For startups you may find random roles that have equal pay globally, but they're relatively uncommon.
Oh, you mean like Spotify? Or those thousands of Mittelstand companies across Europe that Americans don't know about but are actually used in Europe?
But the argument of the parent might be that a very active open source community based in Europe points towards a big potential of experienced developers working at their mid sized companies in the shadow of American big tech. Once big tech is gone...
It’s no mistake China banned foreign companies with infinite money from setting up shop there. It is dangerous and expensive in the long run.