alt Hacker NewsI'm cautiously optimistic. The Cloud and AI Development Act looks especially interesting:
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# Capacity
* at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years;
* simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres;
* improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing; ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensive applications.
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Given the prevalence of 'degrowth' ideas here in the EU and the severe NIMBY problem (even with stuff as basic as housing let alone data centres), I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to be able to pull this off.
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Degrowth was only popular in Germany, UK and Spain. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/no-solid-scientific-basis-deg...
Germany and UK follow a the no growth and it is very unpopular. Spain's economy gives a shit and grows.
Based on the Iran war situation I don't think we should be building more datacentres for security. They are easy targets. We should be concentrating on resilience and that means distributing capacity and capability where possible.
I'm more than cautious too:
> ... initiatives that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing across each stage of the value chain, from chips, to infrastructure, to software, cloud and AI, and in synergy with past and ongoing initiatives such as AI Factories and AI Gigafactories
Software / Cloud: yes, Europe can try to do something but I doubt it. Although it should be pointed out that the EU has one software company in the Top 100 companies in the world by market cap. One. And it's that fucking lame piece of uber-shit that SAP is.
SAP: that's what europeans can do. While the US has Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, CloudFlare, etc. Not that these are all great companies but these are heavyweights compared to that pointless, irrelevant, turd that SAP is.
Chips? Besides ASML (which is only part of the chain), we're a wasteland and ASML is mostly US-owned.
Not going to see the next Intel / AMD / NVidia from the EU: that simply is not going to happen. It just won't.
AI gigafactories? Bull-fucking-crap.
The only area where Europe can try something is software but this must be put in perspective: SAP vs all the US software companies.
Don't forget all we could do is SAP. And that is a monstrous piece proprietary lock-in shit.
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> simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres
With the caveat (one hopes) of learning from the mistakes of the US.