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.
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.