European Tech Alternatives

Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

edit: formatting

I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?

Far more usable (and older AFAIK) site: https://european-alternatives.eu/

There are existing sites like https://www.goeuropean.org/

Based on the creator of EU Tech Map having an AI-powered advertising company and the mistakes in the entries, I assume the site was populated using LLMs. For example, LibreOffice is incorrectly listed as being closed source, SaaS and paid: https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice

It took a minute to load the map points here, and I was sitting thinking this is an attempt at a clever joke

I briefly went thought the list - a lot of hosted systems (probably kubernetes underneath etc). This is not unique or anything.

The list is quite sus ;) did you know that cockroachdb is a German company? :) it’s in the list. And this is like 3rd company in the category that I was checking

https://eutechmap.com/company/cockroachdb

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On more sad note.

Europe still loves their old money, (hidden) class system and deeply entrenched bureaucracy way too much to allow some plebs to get rich that quickly.

European way of doing things to me feels like fundamentally incompatible with high pace way of doing things in software area.

Personally, I don’t believe that anything significant can come up from places other than US or China. About 10 years ago Russians were doing a lot of “own” stuff (clickhouse comes to mind first), but I suspect that isolation and brain drain will eventually capture them.

The title is wrong as they only included EU/EEA/EFTA/UK companies, at least according to their faq page. Which would exclude multiple balkan countries and some others.

They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.

European startups, when they are successful, will eventually end up being bought by Oracle or move to USA. Such is life.

not all that useful. for a more useful alternative I'd prefer to see companies up from a certain size (I've noticed some small startups on the map) and if the're (not) using aws/azure/gcp/chinaCloud (whatever the names are).

If you are going to post a link to a site like this, please also say what point the link is making.

we need european chip makers.

Peak EU mindset thinking all we need is a nifty little map application to find alternatives.

Meanwhile, tech companies are continuing to bail into the US the moment they reach significant revenue due to crushing tax and labour costs (see e.g. Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday)

Unfortunately the EU and many local governments have chosen to double down on crippling socialism (presumedly to "own Trump") so this continue at an accelerating pace.

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I tried to find on that website the equivalents of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, TSMC, Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta, Broadcom, Oracle but didn't succeed.

“Tech alternatives” yet a good portion of the companies I randomly clicked on are software services/outsourcing, especially on the eastern side.

Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets.

Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.

Over the last 20 years, Europe has become irrelevant.

There is not a single European LLM on the same level as US or Chinese models. France's Mistral reached 400M in revenue, but I believe it could have been more relevant if the EU had not slowed everything down with overregulation.

Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me. Sounds like we’ve done this kind of nationalism in the past and failed. There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it. Especially in a company’s early days. Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.

Maybe Europe shouldn’t copy the nationalism, but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist. Think about how they got that far, and especially how China caught up so fast.