The tension between Europe as a whole and the US has been growing a lot, as the hyperscalers are basically all American. I wrote about this risk a while ago.
The problem is capacity. The commercial advantages of cloud hosting don’t go away just because they data risk has increased, they just don’t win against it. The ideal situation for many of us would be cloud providers local to the EU. Now, there are some of these, and I try to use them whenever I can, but if everyone in Europe tried to do it, they simply couldn’t cope with demand. It becomes a bit of a Catch-22. However unmatched demand is a great opportunity.
Of course, for some of the use cases, hosting it yourself becomes the better answer. This may be because you want to get away from US hyperscalers quickly, and this is the only viable path, and you would migrate to a European cloud in the future, or it could be because you want more control, more sovereignty over your own compute. I also wrote about this a month or two ago
What this brushes over, though, is the political and strategic case. Frankly, the EU and the US do have different ideas of what a society should look like – yes, there are some similarities, but they are also under attack. This is the part where the Palantir question comes in (as an almost cartoonish proxy for hyper-capitalism) – should public bodies be able to take account of the political views of potential suppliers?
Palantir was blocked because of procurement rules, but what if the Met had actually done it properly? Would we then be happy to hand over that control to Palantir? If we would want them blocked, then we are handing the power to discriminate on winning contracts based on political views, and that seems like a step towards autocracy and oligarchy. It’s a tough call, and one we need a genuine debate over.
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.