The “EU bad” line gets rolled out so often on HN it has become its own truth. “Everyone knows” that the EU tech industry is getting strangled by its technocratic regulators and that’s why the EU fails at tech har har look at these idiots. Etc.
> Where are their datacenter scale computing companies
There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.
> How many decades did it take for that to arrive there?
Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit.
> It will be the same story with AI.
I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case.
> European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
>European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.
It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI.
OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.
I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR. It is only praised by the Eurocrats themselves or the whole pack of NGOs/think tanks who lives off EU funding. As a guy with a startup I naturally fear this will be as counterproductive as GDPR or the decades of lawsuits against various foreign tech corporations. The fundamental problem is however with the political class.
> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR
Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make.
The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time!
> As a guy with a startup...
If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.
> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR.
I'd like to know those people, especially if their job is connected in any way to the practices the GDPR is fighting against, because, although it may have been created better, I can't find a single reason why ordinary honest people should believe the GDPR shouldn't exist.
carom|2 years ago
European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
hnlmorg|2 years ago
There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.
> How many decades did it take for that to arrive there?
Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit.
> It will be the same story with AI.
I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case.
> European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
FirmwareBurner|2 years ago
No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.
fxtentacle|2 years ago
It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI.
And the Carrefour AI stuff is hosted on OVH cloud (in France), I believe: https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-op...
OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.
zirgs|2 years ago
l5870uoo9y|2 years ago
sensanaty|2 years ago
Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make.
The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time!
> As a guy with a startup...
If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.
squarefoot|2 years ago
I'd like to know those people, especially if their job is connected in any way to the practices the GDPR is fighting against, because, although it may have been created better, I can't find a single reason why ordinary honest people should believe the GDPR shouldn't exist.
csunbird|2 years ago