Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by rikafurude21 on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:06AM (#43855684)

Anyone else see the parallel to the Trump-Tarriff debacle that has been going on - Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech ~15 years ago. Sounds alot like outsourcing everything to chinese manufacturing and then complaining about being dependent on china, which is unfair! At the very least europe has noticed a problem and started thinking about finding a solution, which is a half step in the right direction. The best day to start is today

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by yardie on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:22AM (#43855804)

2 things happen repeatedly in the European tech scene: you get large enough to be noticed by Google, MS, Amazon, and they acquire you. Or, in order to continue to scale you move the entire company to SV, ie Spotify.

If the EU stepped in to block the acquisition or corporate move, in order to keep their tech homegrown, it would be seen as government overreach and not respecting the free markets.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by diggan on Thursday May 01, 2025 @07:39AM (#43856348)

> scale you move the entire company to SV, ie Spotify.

AFAIK, Spotify doesn't have any presence in SV, but the US part is in NYC, besides the presence in Stockholm (obviously) and the holding company in Luxembourg.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by cruzcampo on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:40AM (#43855920)

Maybe it's time we realize free markets are ... bad sometimes?

Why are we sacrificing our sovereignty to an abstract ideology?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by mnky9800n on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:45AM (#43855961)

Because if the EU steps in to stop this you couldn't scale because the EU isn't one big market like the USA it is a bunch of smaller markets that add up to a big markert that all have their version of how things should go. If the EU wants to have hyperscalers like the USA they will at some point need to force EU members to do things like relax language requirements, have more overlapping business law, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by cruzcampo on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:47AM (#43855978)

Yes, I fully agree - this is a super important thing the EU needs to do if it wants any chance at homegrown competition.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by croes on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:43AM (#43855951)

Maybe it’s time to realize that the free markets aren’t as free as claimed

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by bflesch on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:20AM (#43855788)

Hyperscaler is such a middle management buzzword.

Who actually needs hyperscalers? Is it a whole company or just a single app of that company which needs hyperscaling along a certain requirement (storage, processing, bandwidth)?

And if you go into a US vs Europe comparison, SAP seems to be scaling fine. And datacenters used by netflix, cloudflare, etc. are all over the place.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by JumpCrisscross on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:32AM (#43855878)

> Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech

The EU's would seem to vibe more with open source than privately-owned hyperscalers. Maybe host it for free for EU persons and companies.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech indepen... by pabs3 on Thursday May 01, 2025 @08:23AM (#43856751)

Europe would probably be more interested in sovereign computing; open source with on-premises computers.

[ Parent | on HN ]