Like I get that this is part of the platform's marketing but I don't see the sovereignty (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.
China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that.
None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.
The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.
This exact reason was put forward by political thinkers in the 1910s to "prove" that a major war in Europe was completely impossible. It was then put forward again in the 1930s to "prove" the same thing; for real that time.
And it wouldn't be the first time Trump specifically caused grudges. The US just giving up on the Iran deal has certainly already done the same. Not only was the EU also a signatory, but so were the UK, Germany and France individually. And then he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which was also openly opposed by the three I've already mentioned. So now the EU has to second-guess every treaty the US signed, because apparently that signature means less than it used to mean.
But those two past actions would be nothing but a sentence in history books compared to at least a paragraph about the US cutting funding to Ukraine.
Not going to happen. This will result in partitioning of Ukraine and non-aligned status of it. It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances. That war is already lost by everyone except EU, so whatever is American strategy there, it won’t do much harm.
It is absolutely not a "satisfactory outcome" for anyone in the West if Russia's neocolonial aggression is allowed to succeed.
Except for certain segments of the populist right and far left, who are bizarrely unified on this issue.
The EU should therefore not rely on the USA staying a reliable partner just for the sake of the market relations, especially with the possibility of a second Trump term. America is self-centered, unreliable, and politically ruined—you can’t work with populists.
All this is to say: Technological sovereignty is the right direction.
Those people were completely clueless. I don't have a better way to phrase it. Nordstream 2 was an insane idea the second it was announced.
In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that.
Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.
So are the US and Chinese economies. Yet, here we are.
> I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example.
The servers, maybe. I highly doubt AWS will continue to provide access to its platform. Actually there is zero chance they do. The servers are not useful much without the AWS platform.
After the second world war, Europe was developing space launch capability (multiple governments and companies in Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats that competed with American ones couldn't get launch opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed its own launcher.
EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symp...
It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.
How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?